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Russia invading Ukraine is one of the most morally clear-cut conflicts, period. A former empire, much larger than its neighbour/prior colony, invades it due to longstanding revanchist fantasies of reclaiming its lost imperial glory. The smaller country has to fight back to ensure its survival, especially since its aggressor has repeatedly stated its intent to wipe it out even if it submits. Someone who supports Russian irredentism and imperialist warmongering is either someone profoundly ideologically poisoned, evil, or both.

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50, mostly because of all the Agatha Christie novels.

Inell’s Top 100 Books

Definitely not a complete list by any means. Just the 100 I thought of when I was faced with the search box. How many have you read? Reblog with your answer in the tags.

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April 15, 2025, Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition doing the DHS’s work for them.

Khalil and Mahdawi were co-founders of Columbia’s Palestinian Cultural Club.

That is to say, when SJP and JVP were banned, Khalil and Mohsen founded the club that spearheaded the push to reform under CUAD:

When CUAD was formed, that club was the first (not banned) student club on the list:

And again, this is CUAD:

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Worse than Nazis.

This administration delights in being evil and that is just beyond sick.

The narcissism has destroyed the Right. All their values are inverted.

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“[…] I was hounded, day in, day out. Bullied, hounded, with protection from nobody.”

“It’s instructive that this never happened for any other war. Not for Ukraine, not for Sudan, not for D.R.C. [Democratic Republic of Congo], not for Myanmar,” she says. “The focus was always Israel.”

“This was a war,” she says. “Palestinians were killing Israelis, Israelis were killing Palestinians. It needs to be treated like other wars. In other wars, we don’t run and take one side and then keep going on and on about that one side… By taking one side, condemning it every day, you completely lose the essence of what the U.N. was created for.”

[…] Nderitu developed tools to improve online monitoring of hate speech. She also traveled to refugee camps in Bangladesh and Iraq; to Brazil, where the government invited her to assess how the Yanomami and other Indigenous tribes were faring; to Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina to assess the extent of genocide denial; and to Chad, to assess the risk to the various populations of Darfur in Sudan.

Nderitu held press conferences, wrote op-eds, and issued dozens of public statements, all without much, if any, controversy. Alas, not even the good kind. “For these other situations,” says Nderitu, “nobody seems to bother with what I say.”

Then came October 7, 2023.

Nderitu’s first statement on “the situation in the Middle East,” issued on October 15, called for the return of the Israeli hostages as well as a ceasefire. “And then I spoke about Hamas,” she says, “what they did. I described it.... And of course, the key thing that made me the enemy was saying that the attacks happened on Israeli territory, which they did.” (Hamas does not recognize the existence of the state of Israel, which was founded in 1948 and admitted to the U.N. in 1949.)

That night, a U.N. Office of Human Rights civil servant sent her an e-mail on which he copied several top U.N. officials, including the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, and also the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs. (In February of 2023, that undersecretary-general would go viral for saying, in a television interview with Sky News, “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us. As you know, it is a political movement.”)

In his e-mail, the U.N. civil servant described Nderitu’s statement as “one-sided,” suggesting that it “might cause reputational risk on the image of the United Nations as an independent neutral impartial body.” For an institution as hierarchical as the U.N., this kind of direct written critique of an undersecretary-general by a junior staffer was highly unusual, as was his request that Nderitu review her “statement with the aim to ensure greater balance and harmonize it with similar UN leaders statements.”

[…] the social-media pages of Nderitu’s office were being inundated with threatening messages. “They started sending me the threats on my phone,” Nderitu says. “And then they even started threatening me on the U.N. e-mail.” “Filthy zionist rat, you will burn in hell forever for supporting the rape and torture and murder of little kids by your bestial masters,” read one such e-mail.

I first spoke with Nderitu last March for a story about her work as an international human-rights advocate and mediator, and about the pressure campaign against her that was then already underway. For that interview, which took place inside her spacious office on the 31st floor of the U.N.’s Secretariat Building, Nderitu wore a traditional African handmade floor-length dress and headwrap.

But this time we meet inside an Upper West Side apartment at which Nderitu arrived effectively incognito, wearing a mask and looking like any other New Yorker, dressed in a black sweater, black beret, and navy pants. “I didn’t want to stand out,” she says of her outfit.

“The first interview I was telling you it all ends at the peace table,” she reminds me, “and the sooner they do that the better. Well, they didn’t do that, and here we are so many deaths later.

“It’s too much, the focus on Israel,” Nderitu says, adding, “I really don’t think people care about Africans.... I went to Chad, and I met the refugees from Sudan, and they were telling me, Right now, nobody is paying attention to our country. If there is ever peace and the cameras go in, you will face the most shocking thing of the century, a genocide that was completely ignored.... The I.C.C., the I.C.J.: Where are you when it comes to Sudan? You are very efficient when it comes to Gaza.”

The secretary-general and his staff “have made every effort to bring to the attention of the world … the horrendous tragedy unfolding in Sudan—the only country in the world at present where famine has been officially declared—where civilians, including those who are starving, are being killed indiscriminately by the warring parties,” says the U.N. spokesman.

With the war in Gaza now apparently winding down, there is a “huge sense of expectation that the U.N. should play a key role in ending it,” Nderitu says. But given that Israel is currently being accused of genocide by South Africa in the International Court of Justice, which is a U.N. court—a charge that then secretary of state Antony Blinken called “meritless” in January of 2024—the idea of a U.N.-brokered peace seems like a pipe dream.

And yet Nderitu still has hope. Citing the transformative moment that took place in the Balkans back in 1995, she says, “In Bosnia-Herzegovina the parties also didn’t trust the U.N., and so it was an American, Richard Holbrooke, who ended up brokering the peace. We should be looking for more Richard Holbrookes.... We should stop relying too much on institutions.”

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NYTimes: Harvard Says It Will Not Comply With Trump Administration’s Demands

Harvard Says It Will Not Comply With Trump Administration’s Demands https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/harvard-trump-reject-demands.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

Finally, one of the Ivies has refused to comply with Trump's demands.

I have a BA and PhD from Harvard in the Study of Religion - 1985 and 1995.

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Plain and simple

Go find a moral backbone if you think this is remotely okay

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My Alma mater. I hope this is true.

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Ariel & Kfir Bibas z”l by ortworks.jpeg 🧡🧡🧡

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Oh God oh fuck did you see the SCOTUS decision

https://bsky.app/profile/stevevladeck.bsky.social/post/3lmb2477rlc2e

Tldr not only is the restraining order on the renditions thrown out by 5-4 vote, but each individual person black bagged by ICE under the Alien Enemies Act has to seek individual habeas corpus relief.

Which. Y'know. You can't really seek when you're breaking rocks in a gulag in El Salvador.

Like this literally legalizes getting black bagged and shipped out of the country under the Act so long as the government can accomplish it before anyone does anything about it.

I'd say this is at least as dangerous as presidential immunity, if not essentially Korematsu 2: Electric Boogaloo but under a much more malicious administration.

This is very bad! I really don't have anything else to say about it! It's hard to describe exactly how it feels to read this after spending the last decade trying to make my fellow Americans understand how important the Supreme Court is. I'm not saying that to be a liberal cliche, I'm just trying to convey the emotional experience of bracing for something like this for the last several years.

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Trans women are women. Speaking as a cis woman.

The worst thing you can do, as someone who has recently realised they are transfem, is to let terves and transphobes convince you cis women will never accept you.

I was told that when I came out everyone would reject me. That I would find myself isolated from the world, and from other women especially, who would react to me with horror and revulsion.

In reality, within the first months of coming out, in no particular order:

My sister's reaction on my coming out was, "Right, so I have a sister instead of a brother. Cool. I'm taking you clothes shopping tomorrow."

A friend, when she learned I am a woman, immediately invited me to her women-only, girls-night-out birthday party the following week.

Another friend, when a friend of hers expressed doubts about my gender, immediately shut them down and reaffirmed I am a woman.

I went camping with a group of friends, and we had two tents, one for the boys and one for the girls; I was unsure as to which I should enter, to which a girl friend responded by grabbing me and physically dragging me inside the women's tent.

In the women's bathroom at a movie theatre a random woman, whom I'd never seen before and haven't seen since, stopped me as I was going into a stall, to warn me there was no toilet paper in there, because she'd just used the last of it.

All of these, and more, some from friends, some from complete strangers. All within a few months, as a trans woman who hadn't started medical transition yet, and was very visible as being a trans woman.

I've had some people reject me, true, but the vast majority, including almost all cis women, accepted me as a sister with open arms.

Cis women are cool. It's terves who are bigots.

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Haviv Rettig Gur on deaths in Gaza:

The full list of Gazans killed in the war has been released in Gaza. Possibly. At the very least, as Israeli analysts are now finding, there aren't duplicate ID numbers or other tells one finds in obviously manipulated data sets. But here's another reason to trust the data: It shows just how much Israel's warfighting tried to separate combatant from civilian. It seems unlikely that a faked Gazan data set would show such a result. The graph in the first tweet of this thread shows male to female deaths. If female deaths are assumed to be a civilian baseline (the age distribution is roughly the general Gazan population's age distribution), then the enormous spike of the blue line, right in the area of the graph that represents fighting-age men, is the best likely measure of combatant deaths. According to this analyst, the gap comes to over 16,000 dead, or almost exactly a third of total deaths. That's a Gazan data set, not an Israeli one. And it's the most complete one so far, the only one that claims to give all the names of all the dead, the one most likely to be an honest recording of the actual dead. And according to this data set, the death toll in Gaza is two civilians to each combatant, well in line with the highest standards of modern democratic armies. To be clear - this caveat is obvious, but it's important enough to say it explicitly nonetheless - the debate isn't over whether children died in Gaza or crimes were committed. The answer to both is yes. There were definitely and unquestionably war crimes committed in Gaza, air strikes that should not have been carried out. And there are thousands of dead children in this data set. The debate is over the extent, whether these are at a level consistent with the inevitable costs of even the most legitimate kind of war, which will always be horrible, or whether the best data we have shows wanton Israeli killing and disregard for moral rules and international laws. Israel's haters will tweet pictures of dead children in response. If they did that for every war, I'd take them seriously and sympathetically. But the vast majority of them don't. They don't care about dead children, only about destroying Israel. And so they can't actually tell us anything about whether our army, broadly speaking, has fought morally. But this data set can. All war is evil, all war is hell, all war is a kind of civilizational failure. But war is sometimes nevertheless legitimate and inevitable. International humanitarian law came about not to end war, because ending war is impossible, but to mitigate its evils. If this data set is correct - again, a data set released from Gaza and not at all intended to validate any Israeli argument about its battlefield standards - then the costs imposed on Gaza by Israeli warfighting methods are consistent with what is generally considered in the West to be moral and legitimate. It is a comparable ratio to the 2016 Battle of Mosul in which Iraq, the Kurds and America drove ISIS out of the city. War is bad. I respect people who vehemently oppose this one, who question the Israeli political leadership's decisions, who use the war to debate the larger question of Palestinian independence and statehood. These are all legitimate responses to the suffering of Gazans. As is the argument I personally agree with that this war was the only path available to us to rid ourselves and Gaza of the neverending and endlessly destructive scourge of Hamas. But it nevertheless matters - indeed, it may be the most important thing over the long term - that this war's civilian casualties were not worse than other comparable wars, and that even Gazan data sets show that to be the case.

The thread to which Haviv refers is here

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Yes, one of my best friends is 95 (I'm 68).

I need you people to realize that you can be friends with people older than you. like, much older than you. like, decades older than you. you can be friends with these people. regular friends, just like anyone your age. it is possible.

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“I can’t support Lady Gaga knowing she’s a Zionist and worked with Zionists” lol pop music communities are insufferable about this, but more for me (tbh idc about her thoughts on the term, but I do care about inclusivity towards Jewish creators!) 💖💖💖

the (((Zionists))) she worked with on Mayhem:

Michael Polansky, her Jewish fiancée

Andrew Watt, Jewish producer

Gesaffelstein (Mike Lévy), Jewish producer

Bruno Mars, has Jewish ancestry which he has publicly spoken about, condemned the 10/7 massacre and sent prayers to the victims because he was literally in Israel performing that day

why Lady Gaga is an evil Zionist:

performed in Israel

said people don’t understand what they’re talking about when they vilify the whole country (she’s right)

enjoyed Tel Aviv and was excited to see Jerusalem

loves a Jewish man???

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Jesus fed the 5,000, but the people of God can't fill the chasm left by USAID

I have a day job that has nothing to do with feeding people. I’m a missionary trauma surgeon, training Christian Malawian doctors to become surgeons. In Malawi, a country of 21 million people, there’s roughly one surgeon for half a million residents, and to my knowledge I’m the only critical-care board certified physician in all of Malawi. Because of my skills, I’m frequently consulted by the U.S. Embassy and on call for U.S. special forces when they visit Malawi. I really need to do my day job.  Last week I did a lot of things besides my day job. After discovering that 20 nursing students at the college that supports our hospital had lost their funding due to the sudden demise of the U.S. Agency for International Development, I spent time trying to find a donor for them, so they and the school might find a way to continue to train the professionals my hospital desperately needs. I spent several hundred dollars of my own money to feed them and paid my language teacher double, since much of his employment is also through USAID and has abruptly disappeared. The USAID shutdown caused the hospital’s HIV clinic to close and access to malaria medicine for our pediatric ward full of patients to be cut off, as well as tuberculosis medications. I made calls, sent texts and emails, stayed up late at night, trying to help. A few, mostly HIV-related programs, have partially restarted after limited waivers were granted, but there’s still mass confusion and fear, and all programs remain under threat. One friend said he had barely slept in three days. Christian aid workers across the world have similar stories. As the crisis unfolds, I’ve seen countless Christians happily proclaim on social media that “God will make a way,” or that “people of God on the ground” should be doing this kind of work, not the U.S. government. I am the “people of God” on the ground. My husband and three kids have barely seen me this week. Sometimes I have to spend hours in line to get gas for my car to go to work. So, no. The people of God cannot just take over.

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https://www.instagram.com/stories/ithacans4israel/3571727321587425714?utm_source=ig_story_item_share&igsh=M3lxb2loYW54ejQw