some of you care about dunking on individual zionists more than a) challenging Zionism as the violent colonial terrorism it is and b) more than supporting Palestinians. People like Trump, Gal Gadot, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Schumer, Jamie Lee Curtis, and whoever the fuck else - their Zionism isn’t just an excuse to call them losers. It’s a form of terrorism they’re lending their social and political capital to in order to legitimise and further enact that terrorism. Moreover, calling Gal Gadot a shit actor (while incredibly true and accurate) and calling it a day isn’t anti-Zionist enough. Support Palestinians, uplift Palestinians as much as you shit on Zionists otherwise what’s the point. Speaking of which here is a GoFundMe campaign supporting over 80 Palestinian families in Gaza and the West Bank that still hasn’t reached its goal. Support Palestinian art, film, academia, etc too. Read Mohammed El Kurd’s latest book, Perfect Victims. In light of the testimony from survivors of the IOF’s latest massacre Palestinian paramedics, remember Zionism isn’t just something that gives you an excuse to call out celebrities. Zionism is terrorism. Zionism is genocide. May we see and and keep fighting for a free Palestine in our lifetimes.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 decision that over 60,000 votes cast in last year’s closely contested state Supreme Court race must be verified and recounted. The ruling comes after Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin, who lost the race, challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of 2024 voters. Those voters will now have 15 days to verify their eligibility, potentially changing the outcome of the election. Check your name here: https://thegriffinlist.com
VERY URGENT SUPPORT NEEDED!! Teen girl in danger of organ failure!!!!
An unknown individual hacked the 15-year-old Nour’s family’s bank account and stole $1000 USD about to be used for Nour’s treatment!!
Nour needs to receive this treatment IMMEDIATELY!!!! The treatment costs $800 USD, about $1,142 CAD. We need to raise this money URGENTLY or young Nour could go into HEART FAILURE!!
PLEASE donate what you can, and share the family’s campaign as widely as possible!! Copy and paste this link across all your social media platforms and ask your followers and friends for support!! LINK: https://www.gofundme.com/f/4qzqg-help-a-family-from-gaza
You can read more about Nour and her family’s situation here and under our tags “#ibtisam al habil” and “#nour al habil”, tagged below
***IMPORTANT NOTE:
PLEASE REMEMBER THE CONVERSION RATE! The campaign is in Canadian dollars (CAD), but the currency of use on the ground in Gaza right now is mostly USD. In order to donate your intended amount of USD, please pay attention to the conversion rate between CAD and USD. In general, $1 USD=$1.43 CAD
⬆️ racial unity now is matching funds for the detainees and their families. please help if you can.
it’s shameful how long i had to look to find an article covering this story that gives more information besides saying “37 undocumented workers were arrested wednesday.” cascadia news and the AP were the only sources i found that include any journalism whatsoever beyond the police report.
Hey, this is local for me. It would mean a lot if you could help out even a little bit.
Hey everyone, my name is Abdelmajed. I don’t usually talk much about myself, but today, I want to share a little piece of my story.
I was born and raised in Gaza, a place that has always been my home 🏡. I grew up surrounded by my family, my friends, and the streets that I knew like the back of my hand. Life wasn’t always easy, but we had love, laughter, and dreams. I used to think that no matter what happened, home would always be here. But life has a way of changing things in ways we never expect.
Over the past months, everything I once knew has disappeared. The streets that were once filled with children playing are now silent. The houses that held so many memories are now just rubble. And the people I loved—some of them are gone forever. 💔
Hello, where have you been, man or woman? I wanted to tell you that you are now reading this post, either at work, on your break, or with your family, having a good time. I don’t know, but what I want you to know is that I am now writing this post after I was (forced) to flee. Focus on my words. I was forced, under the intensity of the aerial and artillery bombardment, to flee from my home to another place. Why? (Just to search for safety). Imagine, just to stay safe. This will not end here, and I am also suffering from a lack of food and water. This is our life. It is truly difficult. What I am going through cannot be described, but rather lived. I mean in my words that no matter how much I write, say, document, or take videos and photos, it will not be enough to describe our situation. Therefore, my friend, I ask you to donate to me if you can, and if you cannot, and I truly appreciate everyone’s circumstances, just share. Maybe someone else who has the ability to donate will see this post and donate, so please donate.
I swear to God, if someone were to trap 2 million animals, deprive them of food and water, and kill 50,000 of them, the world would be shaken by this catastrophe and brutality.
What’s happening is unbelievable, illogical. We are human beings… human beings!!
I love when household beasts are like whoa. You were gonna piss all on your own? No backup or companionship or anything? Babe. I got you. I’m right here. You don’t have to be alone during this difficult time (pissing), and you won’t be. Ever. This is not a discussion.
my friend’s shiba inu is extremely good at puzzle toys and deeply obsessed with them and today she’s been consumed by madness in one room she doesn’t want to leave and we finally figured out it’s because i sucked up some loose kibble in the little handheld vacuum, thus creating an unsolvable puzzle toy
When you say you're anti-CAM what does that mean? Like what does CAM mean in that context? I genuinely haven't seen that acronym before and I'm assuming you aren't anti-camming as in like the form of sex work
I am capable of turning off my inner annoying atheist, I am incapable of turning off my inner annoying quackwatcher.
I have had real life fights with people I genuinely love about this and I do not regret it. I will absolutely not regret shitting all over someone’s $500 herbalist certification.
Warding spells are real, if you want me to stay far away from you forever tell me that you practice reiki.
The nice thing is that I will probably never bring this kind of thing up. I’m never going to go out of my way to figure out if the people around me are, like, really into homeopathy. The less nice thing is that if you bring it up with me I am never, ever, ever going to shut up about it and if you attempt to show me a *study* on the healing power of prayer or the use of chiropractic to treat asthma we are forever enemies and I probably won’t talk to you again but I will use the several hours of furious debunking that I did after our conversation to make arguments against your beliefs in the future. You are already a lost cause to me but other people are less stupid about the way that ice crystals form and I can work with them.
I *loathe* medical woo, it kills people and the people who engage in it are shitty human beings who are hurting other human beings.
RE: Herbalism
I don’t think that there’s a proponent of science-based medicine alive who doesn’t understand that plant compounds are important in medicine and it is important to research them. We *DO* get a lot of medicine from plants.
But “medicine from plants” and “herbalism” are not the same.
The example that most people like to bring up is aspirin and willow bark tea. You can use willow bark as a painkiller, you can collect your own and brew it up when you’ve got a headache.
What you can’t do is control the dose. You can’t do this for a number of reasons, including having little control over the conditions the tree grew in and variations in preparation technique. If you’re measuring very exactly you can control for some of these things, but even if you were in charge of the willow tree you collected the bark from it’s not going to be the same at different places on the trunk or in different seasons.
That’s not a huge deal if you’re using aspirin for a headache, it can be a much bigger deal if you’re using aspirin as a bloodthinner.
And the example that people LIKE to use is aspirin because it *isn’t* a big deal. The example they *don’t* like to use is foxglove (digitalis, which produced digitoxin, which can be used to treat heart failure) because that’s a medicine from a plant that you can’t fuck around with using herbalism, it needs extremely careful extraction and preparation because if it’s done wrong it’ll just straight kill you.
And then you get into herbal treatments that are generally safe and largely not harmful even if they may not do anything, and it can feel totally reasonable to recommend red raspberry leaf tea to a friend who is having cramps. As long as that friend isn’t diabetic because red raspberry leaf interacts with insulin. And as long as your friend isn’t on an anticoagulant because red raspberry leaf can ALSO act as an anticoagulant.
And those are just examples of what can happen if you know you are actually getting the plant that you think that you are getting and that it is unadulterated with fillers and uncontaminated with anything else and is properly prepared (or is prepared the same way as the last batch you bought and so it can be dosed the same way).
There are two ways that Kava Kava can be prepared; do you know which of those two ways is associated with more deaths and liver transplants? Do you know not to take Kava if you have a history of liver issues or if you are on antidepressants? (ctrl+f for “Hema Ketha” for the study from that overview that goes in depth on that; for whatever reason you can read the whole article in the overview but if you click on the link you only get the abstract)
One of my big, big problems with CAM - including herbalism - is that people turn to it because they think it is safer than “allopathic” medicine. They think “it’s better to drink raspberry leaf tea than it is to take midol because midol is full of chemicals and raspberry leaf tea is just tea.” But midol doesn’t interact with insulin, and most people are *aware* they’re taking a blood thinner when they take NSAIDs.
There’s this tea shop I go to that has maybe a hundred different kinds of herbal teas, some of which are clearly supposed to be medicinal, but the one that always stands out to me is the St. John’s Wort tea that has “NOT FOR PREGNANT” on the label. It’s good that they’re recommending that pregnant people don’t select that tea, but that tea is also not for people on antidepressants, triptans, birth control, warfarin, stantins, protease inhibitors, or people who have had solid organ transplants.
But it’s just tea. And what could just tea do, right?
(It could make your anti-rejection meds so weak that it kills you. That’s what just tea can do. But maybe one cup of older tea, or one cup that is more leaf than flower, or one cup that wasn’t steeped as long doesn’t hurt, so you drink it and you think it’s fine, it’s not a problem, and it isn’t a problem until it is but you don’t know the difference between one cup of tea and the next because this shit is impossible to dose)
This is also why I’m extremely leery of the “you can try CAM as long as you are using it alongside your doctor’s care and you do what the doctors say” thing because that is relying on:
Doctors being aware of all of these possible interactions (which is a stretch; pharmacists are likely to have a better handle on it but even then, there are all kinds of supplements being labeled all kinds of things all the time; medical woo scammers LOVE to rebrand their supplements)
So long story short I’m not particularly bothered if you try herbalism on yourself after looking into things that you think will help you. I do have a problem with people who *recommend* herbal treatments without A) a full medical background understanding of the person they recommend the treatment to and B) comprehensive knowledge of whether the thing that you’re recommending will interact with any medications they might be taking or exacerbate any conditions that they might have and C) some kind of accountability mechanism in place - like a malpractice suit or the loss of license - like a doctor might if they prescribed a medication that was dangerous to their patient.
Because that’s the other infuriating thing - CAM practitioners often aren’t held to the same standards as medical professionals. Patients who trust CAM practitioners often think of them like doctors, but they don’t have the same protection from CAM practitioners like they would from doctors. If your herbalist tells you to treat your cancer with apricot pits or black salve - even if that’s in addition to chemotherapy - it could end up seriously injuring you and they’re not committing malpractice because there’s no legal standard for their practice. Nobody can remove their license because there’s no such thing as an herbalist license, so whatever harm they did to you can be done to other people after you with no professional consequences.
People often say LOTR is a story about hope. (I’m reminded of it because someone said it in the notes of my Faramir post.) And that’s true, but it’s not the whole picture: LOTR is in large part a story about having to go on in the absence of hope.
Frodo has lost hope, as well as the ability to access any positive emotion, by Return. He is already losing it in Towers: he keeps going through duty and determination and of course Sam’s constant help.
For most of the story, Sam is fueled by hope, which is why it’s such a huge moment when he finally lets go of the hope of surviving and returning home, and focuses on making it to the Mountain. To speed their way and lighten the load, he throws his beloved pots and pans into a pit, accepting that he will never cook, or eat, again.
When Eowyn kills the Witch King, she’s beyond hope and seeking for a glorious death in battle. It’s possible that in addition to her love and loyalty for Théoden, she’s strengthened by her hopelessness, the fear of the Nazgúl cannot touch someone who’s already past despair.
Faramir is his father’s son, he doesn’t have any more hope of Gondor’s victory or survival than Denethor does, he says as much to Frodo. What hope have we? It is long since we had any hope. … We are a failing people, a springless autumn. He knows he’s fighting a losing war and it’s killing him. When he rejects the ring, he doesn’t do it in the hope that his people can survive without it, he has good reason to believe they cannot. He acts correctly in the absence of hope.
Of course LOTR has a (mostly) happy ending, all the unlikely hopes come true, the characters who have lost hope gain what they didn’t even hope for, and everyone is rewarded for their bravery and goodness, so on some level the message is that hope was justified. But the book never chastises characters who lost hope, it was completely reasonable of them to do so. Despair pushed Théoden and Denethor into inaction, pushed Saruman into collaboration, but the characters who despaired and held up under the weight of despair are Tolkien’s real heroes.
(In an early draft of Return, Frodo and Sam receive honorary titles in Noldorin: Endurance beyond Hope and Hope Unquenchable, respectively. Then he cut it, probably because it was stating the themes of the entire book way too obviously, because this is what Tolkien cared about, really: enduring beyond hope. Without hope.)
Also, people who know more than me about the concept of estel, feel free to @ me.
I agree with everything in the above post, and think that the knife’s edge balance between despair and hope in LOTR is a really important theme when you see the characters that fall into despair and the ones that don’t, and the ones that despair but don’t fall.
But the thing about estel is that it’s not the only elvish word for hope. There’s amdir, which is hope with a foundation, it’s based on something. Estel is hope without that foundation, based on nothing at all–a fool’s hope, if you will. It’s what drives the entire Quest, because sending the Ring to Mt Doom is objectively insane and there is no reason to believe that it’ll work beyond like, Elrond saying so (and if anyone is familiar with estel, it’s Elrond). But it does work, because everyone in the Fellowship comes together to make sure that it will, because they’re clinging to that estel with their last fingernails and they aren’t letting go. Even if they give up hope for themselves or for their homes for for their loved ones.
Anyway all that to say I just wanted to highlight this passage from ROTK:
Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.
That’s the hope that people are talking about when they say LOTR is about hope, I think. It’s a hope that’s bigger than any single character, and it’s so hard and at times impossible to keep holding on to, but in the end it wins out, in spite of everything.
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