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I am most happy underwater

When are you most happy? I love swimming and sailing but the most happy I have been since a child is under water. I have always preferred diving to regular swimming and as an adult I learned to freedive. I now live in the deep south of Cape Town which has done exquisite underwater fauna and flora, check out the documentary “My Octopus Teacher”. So yeah under water is where I am most happy.

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Not sure how f this is just a South African thing or if neighbourhood WhatsApp groups always end up being about some “dodgy character” walking somewhere who always turns out to be a person of colour.

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The problem isn’t Trump or fascism, it’s democracy itself. This guest column, written by PG on Crimethinc eight years ago, just after Trump was elected, pound out that “Fascism is Obsolete, Whiteness is Here to Stay”: https://crimethinc.com/2016/12/13/feature-does-trump-represent-fascism-or-white-supremacy

While that is a good point, I do believe it’s correct to call Trump a fascist: https://crimethinc.com/2016/12/16/counterpoint-yes-trump-represents-fascism even though that label might not be very useful as pointed out by PG and Robert Paxton: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/magazine/robert-paxton-facism.html

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Hey Parents, Make Halloween Dangerous Again

In many ways, Halloween was my first taste of Queer anarchism — Read on www.counterpunch.org/2024/10/31/hey-parents-make-halloween-dangerous-again/

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The years that Trump could return to the White House is terrifying. Even if he doesn’t win the election, the fact that he’s t was so close says everything, not just about the US but about the world we live in. Fascism is on the rise everywhere and I don’t even know what to say. Really depressing world we live in. And Gaza and Climate Change and the general state of affairs. #depressing…

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Website traffic spikes : spam or ?

In the Jetpack app on my phone, which keeps track of my WordPress sites, I keep getting these messages about this blog (zonk.be) getting lots of traffic: about 50 hourly views (which is a lot since I might get one visitor a day): If you’ve ever managed a WordPress blog you’ll know spam is a huge issue. Even if you hardly get regular visitors those spambots will find your site and if you have…

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Get them started young

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Mastodon is where it’s at

As the latest wave of people fleeing Twitter is coming to Threads and Bluesky, I’d like to once more say that Mastodon is the best place to get as it is inherently safer than any other social network. Here are a few links to get you started on Mastodon: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/08/mastodon-quick-start-guide/ https://mastodonservers.net/servers/lgbtq

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Dads cool

Found a new Mastodon instance: dads.cool If you are not familiar with how Mastodon works, it is a decentralised and federated social network which means a lot of different instances are all connected and so you can reads post and follow peeps on other instances. This dads.cool instance is for dads, as they put it themselves: dads.cool is an instance for dads; if you apply to become a user,…

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Transphobia is vile and on the rise in a lot of place. Speak out against it or be complicit, there’s no middle ground on this.

UN organization for women condemns gender-criticals and other transphobes

UN Women is the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. UN Women have published a statement where they condemn anti-transgender activism, including the "gender critical" "radical feminists".

UN Women outlines five key points about the growing anti-rights pushback against LGBTIQ+ communities globally:

Anti-rights movements are on the rise, UN Women points out, exploiting instability to bring reactionary beliefs into the mainstream and reverse gains for marginalized groups. Hate crimes against LGBTIQ+ people have increased significantly in recent years across multiple regions.

UN Women writes:

"While the contexts and motivations of these movements are distinct, they often overlap in retaliation against what they view as 'gender ideology': a term used to oppose the concept of gender, women’s rights, and the rights of LGBTIQ+ people broadly.  There is a long tradition in which anti-rights movements frame equality for women and LGBTIQ+ people as a threat to so-called 'traditional' family values. Movements encompassing 'anti-gender', 'gender-critical', and 'men’s rights' have taken this to new extremes, tapping into wider fears about the future of society and accusing feminist and LGBTIQ+ movements of threatening civilization itself."

2. These movements play on stereotypes and engineered anxiety, falsely associating LGBTIQ+ people with mental illness, perversion, and indoctrination of youth, UN Women argues. They particularly target transgender women.

3. LGBTIQ+ rights are being wedged into existing "culture war" narratives, framed as competing with women's rights or as a generational dispute. The push for LGBTIQ+ rights is falsely portrayed as a Western agenda, ignoring diverse gender identities across cultures.

4. LGBTIQ+ organizations and human rights defenders face defunding, exclusion from civic spaces, and restrictions on operating. Anti-rights groups receive increasing private funding compared to LGBTIQ+ movements.

5. Working for LGBTIQ+ rights is indivisible from gender equality, UN Women argues. Feminist movements must push forward collectively to protect LGBTIQ+ equality, countering disinformation that divides marginalized groups

Read the whole text here.

See also:

UN Women Calls Gender-Criticals An Extremist Anti-rights Movement

"The TERFminator" – Lesbian feminist LGBTQA-activist puts "gender critical" transphobes in their place

An ex-TERF writes about misogyny in “gender critical” feminist culture

Photo: UN Women/Felix Maia

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You can only reblog this today.

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israelis love being like "how dare you accuse us of this crime? this is so unthinkable. we would never do that. we investigated, have fabricated fake evidence, and have found this claim baseless."

only to immediately commit the exact same crime they were accused of again, but this time with zero pretense

works cited:

israel killing journalists: - how dare you accuse us of killing a journalist? (shireen abu akleh) - we investigated and found this claim baseless - israel killing over 95 palestinian journalists in gaza

israel bombing hospitals: - how dare you accuse us of bombing a hospital? (al-ahli hospital bombing) - we investigated and found this claim baseless - israel bombing multiple hospitals in gaza and then shelling and invading the rest

israel killing starving palestinians trying to get food: - how dare you accuse us of shooting palestinians trying to get food? (flour massacre) - we investigated and found this claim baseless - israel killing palestinians trying to get food again two days later

worth noting also in every single case not only is the original accusation always proven true, albeit to much less fanfare from western media that originally amplified the israeli denial, but it's occasionally proven indisputably true after they've already done it again. just really impressive levels of "what were you gonna do about it, anyway?"

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Too true.

i actually dont give a shit if hamas did everything and worse that israel accuses them of it still doesn't justify killing 30000 random civilians

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“This Is What Our Ruling Class Has Decided Will Be Normal”

On Aaron Bushnell’s Action in Solidarity with Gaza

https://crimethinc.com/AaronBushnell

On February 25, we received an email from a person who signed himself Aaron Bushnell, announcing that he was going to engage in an act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Shortly afterwards, Aaron set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC.

All afternoon, while other journalists were breaking the news, we discussed how we should speak about this. Some subjects are too complex to address in a hasty social media post.

Here, we share some of our thoughts about tragedy, urgency, and sacrifice.