After 75 years of failure, one would imagine that a people would learn what works and what doesn’t, both from their own experience, as well as the experience of others.
The word itself came into popular usage in the West only around after the 50th anniversary of that war as a description of that #displacement and not of a war at all—a tale of unjust #suffering and #colonial affliction laced with transparent #HolocaustEnvy 🔥🔥🔥, which is its unspoken appeal for the Westerners who use it
@mrcompletely
I think about my dad, a Boomer, born and raised in post-Independence India, by an intellectual poet-academic Brahmin father who was also a Marxist.
My dad had a sister, closest to him in age, likely a lesbian and who committed suicide when she became pregnant via an arranged marriage in the 1970’s.
I grew up with a grieving father, who didn’t have the words to describe how the patriarchal system had fucked over his life.
375,000 NATIVE ANIMALS KILLED by One Program in 2023
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's notorious #WildlifeServices program just put out its required tally of #killings for last year: 375,045 native animals. The federal extermination program targets a long list of wild creatures, chiefly at the behest of #agricultural interests in states like #Texas, #Colorado and #Idaho.
According to the report — which almost surely understates the actual numbers —
"I'm horrified by both the sheer number of animals killed and the immense #suffering involved," said Collette Adkins, the Center's carnivore conservation director.
Keeping #dolphins, #orcas and other cetaceans in #captivity is cruel. Depriving them of the vast open spaces and social bonds that they would normally have in the wild, and confining them to small, concrete #tanks to perform tricks for dead fish is highly unethical for these complex marine mammals. No matter how sophisticated the enclosure, no man made facility can ever hope to replicate the wild world of dolphins and whales.
ASK CARNIVAL CRUISE LINES TO END ALL TIES TO DOLPHIN CAPTIVITY
Dolphin Project is requesting that #CarnivalCruiseLines — Carnival Corporation & #PLC end their collaborations and partnerships with the #DolphinCaptivity industry. The dolphin captivity industry is responsible for the immense #suffering and premature #deaths of #dolphins and other #whales across the world.
Someone I recently met who studied under Buddhist monks put it this way:
"The only thing we can really control is how we relate to everything else."
When you choose to relate to everything around you in conflict, when you choose to relate to the world as its victim, you inevitably become a void. You accept a station that was not given to you, but that you've given to yourself. You accept a mindset of eternal war: war with yourself, war with others, war with community, war with society.
I find myself less and less on here, because this once positive space of learning and shared ideas has, for some reason, devolved into voids. Voids of self-appointed victimhood, of constant warring with everything, everyone. I find myself more and more particular about the people I allow into my space, because even some people I find very dear are voids, and I am very sensitive to it, and because I am still learning how to create the appropriate psychic boundaries. Because I am, also, prone to becoming a void, and because if I spend too much time in others' I tend to then create one myself, and I want to choose not to allow myself this.
It's harder for many of us to choose the alternative: to relate to the world as its beneficiary, as a responsible steward of it, as a crucial moving part of it, even when it sometimes wrongs us; to relate to others with compassion and empathy and appropriate boundaries rather than constant conflict. It's easy to choose neural feedback loops of cortisol and adrenaline -- it feels good for a moment (and then it feels bad long term as it impacts our health negatively), our society provides plenty of opportunities to do so, and many of us learned to seek these feedback loops in our environments growing up. But what feels better, long term, that is harder to cultivate, are the feedback loops of dopamine through appropriate action and fulfilling achievement, oxytocin through true connection and existence among and with others, and so on.
It's easy and even rewarded in our society to tell me I'm wrong: "I don't get to choose how I feel about anything. If it's bad, it's bad, and it has to be bad." It takes work to relate to hardships with resilience, to accept that "trauma", the way that our lives shape us, is not always negative.
Pain is real, suffering is a choice. This I've learned. This I continue to learn, the hard way, each and every day as I engage with this journey I've been tasked with.
I’ve been here a while now but I’m still figuring things out. I’m not great at lifing but I keep trying. Growing every day. And I’ll never figure it all out, but that’s okay; it’s a journey not a destination.
I’m grateful for the amazing things life has gifted to me. Of which there is an abdunace. I forget because of the suffering. But taking a moment to pause and remember the good stuff helps a lot.
Israel just bombed a tent city full of #refugees who fled North #Gaza for #Rafah on the #IDF's orders.
Horrifying photos show families frantically rummaging through the carnage for the limbs of their family members. I won't reproduce them here, but they can be found on the bird site from @gazanotifications
They are murdering poor people trapped in a concentration camp, in the places they were told to flee for safety. They are killing impoverished, innocent, starving Palestinians, mostly under 30, with nowhere else to go.
This brutality is unparalleled in my lifetime. All studies show that Israel is in a class of its own, outdoing the Dresden bombings by a landslide. Saying this is not antisemitic: it is your duty, whoever you are.
I am #Jewish: spiritually, scholarly, and Litvak Ashkenazi. It's not antisemitic for me, OR ANY NON-JEW to say. In fact, its every human's duty to call for this bloodshed to cease IMMEDIATELY, and to even call for this genocidal Zionist occupation to be dismantled before there is any more blood shed. Nothing keeps my heart beating like my Arab and Muslim comrades speaking out against this barabarism every day. All while facing the harshest consequences of anyone! This ugliness would quite literally drive me to kill myself if I didn't know so many people who are so brave.
I have been doing activism in Palestine since 2012, both boots-on-the-ground defense of protestors, and teaching programming. These are not antisemites; my Palestinian friends are as close to me as any others. And I have had 6 students murdered in Gaza in 120 days. All the others are starving, fleeing from tent city to tent city, trying to survive the most hellish circumstances of drone democide any people have ever witnessed in the history of humanity. Thats a simple fact now.
If you are a goy and claim to support this in our name, WE WILL REMEMBER. The vast majority of #Jews outside of Israel who are under 40 years old are anti-Zionists today. All the fastest growing Jewish organizations of the past decade are anti-Zionist. And we will not forget those who cheered on a 21st century #Holocaust while evoking the memory of our family members killed by Nazi #Germany. Especially not the #Germans, who have been by far the worst inciters and supporters of genocide outside of #Israel.