This post is your reminder that you are not obligated to blog about current events.
Things are bad. Really bad. Do not let people guilt trip you into tormenting yourself even further over the fact that things are bad. Doomscrolling is not activism.
If you’re just on tumblr to blorbopost or reblog pretty pictures, you are not harming people by inaction.
You are not a bad person for not dedicating every aspect of your life and leisure space to whatever disgusting mask-off attack on human life and dignity some government has decided to enact.
Take action where you can, but don’t confuse doomscrolling and digital self harm for action.
If you need to lose yourself in blorboposting, go for it.
If you need to log off for the day, whether it’s to take irl action or to protect what little sanity any of us have left over the past 7 years, then by all means, do.
Morale is important. Hope is important. Small joys keep us from burning out completely in times like this. Do not let any “if you don’t reblog this I’m judging you” guilt trip convince you otherwise.
Even investigative open source journalists at places like Bellingcat, who make a living sifting through this type of information, take breaks while dealing with this and make sure they have downtime. There are specific methods for reducing the amount of vicarious trauma that people get from seeing imagery of violence, and mixing that stuff in with the fun little escapist hobbies of one’s tumblr is not on the recommended list.
Synecdochic on how to block out seeing things related to current events, or on mitigating the trauma of seeing it if you feel you must stay informed: https://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/803314.html
Thank you very much @sunlit-skycat for posting it; it was written about the war in Ukraine but goes absolutely just as much for current conflicts and everything else.
Remember that you don’t help by breaking yourself to no purpose. If anything, you literally make things worse; you create someone else that needs help.
I’ve had to block a couple people, so it’s worth noting:
if your response to this is to start screaming How Dare We when [thing] is going on, how inhuman, etc, then just preemptively block me instead; it will save you time and effort.
for many people, handling their literal fucking suicidality is in fact a life or death thing for them. And if you start with “well they don’t have good enough reason to be suicidal compared with - ”, again, just fuck off. I want nothing to do with you. You do not get to demand people risk their lives in order that they adequately perform virtue as you understand it for you, especially when it’s as pointless and useless as doomscrolling shit is.
I’m gonna be a bit mean here: your outrage is actually useless. The harm you are doing yourself is useless. Your “witnessing” is mostly useless. Your reblogging is not activism. You want to be useful get up off your ass and go raise some funds; get up off your ass and find some protests or demonstrations or useful fucking interviews to do; get up off your ass and go volunteer for an organization that might put your boots on the ground to do some work. Oh, you can’t? Disability, poverty, your job, your school, your something about your life makes that impossible? Right, so you’re in exactly the same fucking position as the person who needs to not reblog everything horrible ever in order to preserve their sanity, it’s just you perceive your limits and needs as valid, and are shitting on everyone else.
consciousness raising is only any use at fucking all if it leads to specific, targeted, effective action. Otherwise it’s a fucking performance of grief and outrage to no point, and causing no virtue.
At least a few of the people I’ve just blocked are quite young, and I have sympathy for hitting your very first Really Fucking Awful Human Atrocity and realizing how powerless you actually are to do fuck all about it, and how shit that makes you feel, especially when you’re home safe. But I’m not your mom, and you’re hurting other people as you lash out - including some of those you’re supposedly lashing out on behalf of - so unfuck yourselves somewhere other than bouncing off my reblogs.
For everyone else: honestly that utility thing - “is this actually useful? does this do anything that helps?” - actually still applies. If you’re struggling with it, it can also be worth sitting down and (possibly with help, if you’re really unsettled) going through what things that do have some uses are that you could do.
Shockingly enough, it may actually turn out that they include things like “providing some kind of diverting distraction for the person who hasn’t heard from their family yet today”, because providing a small space of escape for a friend is something you can actually do, that will help you both. And so on.
I was asked why there’s a zionist claim that the Palestininian identity is not legitimate. And I think it’s important to understand why Palestinians as a whole are seen as a threat by Israel. To understand why it’s not about Hamas.
The claim is that the Palestininian identity was made up in order to push us out. Palestinian existence is a threat to the legitimacy of Israel as a country.
I was taught in school that Palestine was empty when we got here. They used a Mark Twain quote. It was a barren land full of swamps and some nomadic people (Beduins) but as soon as we wanted to come here, the awful antisemitic Arabs sent people to settle here before we could to take up the space. I was in school in the settlements though. I was taught the most extreme version of this.
Another version of this is that Palestine was never its own thing, they’re just Arabs the same as all Arabs from the surrounding countries. So they could just… scooch over and give us the space, please and thank you. In Israel no one uses the term Palestinian. If I do, people roll their eyes and dismissively go “Arab.” An Arab is an Arab. It’s a way to strip away their unique identity and blend them in with the rest to say they could always move to Jordan, or Syria, or Lebanon, and it’s all the same to them.
It’s a way to make Palestinian existence by itself into a malicious plot to deny us a homeland.
Because if Palestinians exist as a distinct group of people, we aren’t the only ones with a connection to this land. And you don’t create an ethnostate by sharing.
You still hear echoes of this mentality. Why won’t all these Muslim countries take the people of Gaza as refugees? That’s asking why they won’t let Israel make its ethnic cleansing more neat and convenient. Yes, refugees should be taken in and given shelter. But this question shifts responsibility away from Israel. Palestinians shouldn’t be forced suffer either ethnic cleansing that leaves them as refugees, or a genocide.
breq: officers usually don’t notice when their ships really like them, they just feel comfortable and have everything they want almost before they can even think of wanting it
also breq: interesting how i’ve never had to consciously ask for ship to show me things i want to see, and now when i’m feeling bad for taking advantage and trying to stop peeping on my officers, ship stops showing me things! ship must really dislike me
just to be completely clear, the amount of military power and political influence Israel has has NOTHING to do with its settlers being Jewish. Israel is a force for American & European interests in the region and they’re just doing what America does and allows/encourages its close allies to do.
war crimes aren’t considered war crimes when someone America finds useful is doing them. european and american pushback against anyone criticizing Israeli apartheid & genocide is 100% because these crimes are useful to American & European hegemony.
Governments that are deeply antisemitic, like France, aren’t suddenly caring about Jewish people. Jewish people, persecuted the world over, don’t hold some kind of hegemonic power outside of Israel.
The state of Israel and its attendant brutal treatment of the locals are both incredibly useful to the US, and American hegemony means we’re expected to celebrate both.
not bc they’re Jewish. this isn’t a break in the pattern of western antisemitism and it’s not evidence that antisemitism doesn’t exist.
it’s just like how you could get fired for saying shit against the US war in Afghanistan when i was growing up. it is 100% about US military and political interests (ok slightly western europe too but lbr)
I actually really like the thing when you’re starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn’t natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me “every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week.” And I understood.
I don’t think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words “humidity” or “stress”, I managed to string together: “This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me.” And she understood.
And sometimes you just say things weird, but it’s better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn’t know the spanish word for “hurry”, but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english “I have all the time in the world.”
The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn’t expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.
I’ve mostly learned Chinese in school, so I know a lot of academic vocabulary while having the language skills of a toddler in some basic areas. Once, I forgot the word for sad, which is a really dumb thing to forget. A bunch of the ways to say sad in Chinese are literally just “not happy”, but I also momentarily forgot how to say happy. So instead I said “there is an economic downturn inside my brain”.
A friend of mine was in Germany and wanted to talk about something that was made of wood, but couldn’t remember the word for wood, so she resorted to “Baumfleisch” (tree-meat) and was understood.
[image description: ““Attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes,” pointed out Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. “Cutting off men, women, children [from] water, electricity and heating with winter coming,” she continued—“these are acts of pure terror.” Von der Leyen is right, of course, but in this instance she was referring to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure. As for Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s infrastructure, Von der Leyen says that Israel has the right to defend itself.”]
Magpie decided to be a rogue because… does this one actually need explanation? He’s here to stealth critical the back of your head, you’ll never see him coming.
mags // 34 // существо среднего рода // 404 preferred pronouns not found (current frontrunner: *throws up hands in frustration and mumbles vaguely about how singular they will do I guess*) // "better than a lot of people (and some cats) (at being a cat)" - @someofthemusic //
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