flowersfortheriot

[flowersfortheriot]

the most important panels of this comic for sharing purposes. the al manasra family are vetted by el-shab-hussein and nablusi at #192 here. as of 11/26/24, they are about $20,000 short of necessary travel funds. this is their only opportunity to escape.

thank you. whoever you are. may god protect you.

[flowersfortheriot]

🚨urgently need help🚨

I am Mai, and I write to you today feeling both weak and desperate. My family is going through an incredibly difficult time in Gaza, where crises keep piling up with no end in sight. But the pain I feel right now is not just because of what we’re enduring in Gaza, but because my father suddenly fell ill, and he is now in Egypt urgently needing a catheterization procedure to have a stent placed.

This procedure is vital to save his life, but the cost ranges from $1300 to $1500, an amount that we simply cannot afford given the difficult economic conditions we are facing. Since I started this campaign back in February, I’ve only managed to raise less than 10% of the goal, and time keeps passing as we wait for any glimmer of hope. Now, I find myself unable to provide the treatment my father desperately needs.

My family and I have no choice but to turn to you. Without your donations, we simply cannot survive or stay afloat. You are our only hope in this crisis. Every donation, no matter how small, means so much to us—it means saving my father’s life and giving us hope for a better tomorrow. Without your support, we would not be able to withstand these challenges. donate what you're able to or 5$ AT LEAST to my gofundme or my paypal is also available and they accept any transfer amount. and i know you all afford to give away at least 1$ !

Please be our pillar in these difficult times. You are our hope, and with your help, we can get through this crisis. my campaing vetted by : @90-ghost @bilal-salah0 @gaza-evacuation-funds The ButterflyEffect Project number : 1197 @a-shade-of-blue

@irangp @tamamita @irvine--kinneas @irvine--kinneas @myceliacrochet @labutansa @lavendercoded @latvanseuss @lavenderr-starrs @nabulsi @apas-95 @dlxxv-vetted-donations @magic-can @victormcdicktor @sweetsweethate @gaza-evacuation-funds @ankle-beez @abuhamdasblog @vaas @vampiricvenus @t-800terminator-blog

[flowersfortheriot]

Please help my friend afford food.

Mahmoud @ma7moudgaza2 and his family are running out of food.

In order to afford a sack of flour that lasts his family of 20 people A SINGLE WEEK, Mahmoud has to risk a difficult journey laden with criminal gangs hired to steal aid, and pay the equivalent of $350 USD.

They eat so scarcely that Mahmoud updates me when they are able to acquire food. The messages are too far apart for my peace of mind. Please help relieve Mahmoud of this burden.

$21,080 / $35,000 as of 24 November 2024.

[flowersfortheriot]

Celia Paul, Painter Seated in her Studio, (2023). © Celia Paul, Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

[flowersfortheriot]

really turns me into the joker hearing people be like "oh citizens of the DPRK can't travel to other countries or work, they're all trapped there" when that was literally a UN thing. like the UN is the one who decided that not the north korean government.

[flowersfortheriot]

One major factor that makes the nature of psychiatric treatment intrinsically violent is the fact that the boundaries of the patient is considered an obstacle to treatment. The lack of consent of the patient is considered an obstacle to treatment. These obstacles are abhorred by psychiatry and considered things that much be broken down. If the patient has a disagreement with the treatment, or objects to it, this is considered a symptom and therefore is seen as something not to be validated or respected. Thoughts, behaviors, beliefs; these are all considered symptoms if they are in opposition to treatment and must be broken down. However, compliance with treatment is almost never seen as disordered or symptomatic, even if the patient is fawning or similarly complying to avoid more harm done to them. The fact that only extreme compliance is accepted by psychiatry is inherently violent and conditions people to accept abuse. Isolation and violence are not vectors of healing.

[flowersfortheriot]

REPIN, ILYA (1844-1930)

The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice, signed.

Oil on canvas

Macdougalls

[flowersfortheriot]

[flowersfortheriot]

“We prefer to take responsibility for the bad side of revolution than to live with responsibility for the injustices of the established order”

[flowersfortheriot]

[flowersfortheriot]

Augustina Wang (American, 1991) - Opal Knight Guarding Mother (2022)

[flowersfortheriot]

Guerrilla Girls: The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist (1988)

[flowersfortheriot]

Lol I forgot that in this interview with Said he literally says ‘but Arabs are also very diverse, so many cultures, histories, religions…’ and the interviewer deadass says ‘sects, yes’ and Said explains he’s Christian and the interview again says ‘well back to your Arab past…’

[flowersfortheriot]

also (advice to ppl across the world) if u guys have a lot of family members that seem to be getting radicalized lately because they're following elon musk on twitter or whatever i really recommend taking their phones and following some people you consider regular so their algorithm balances out, and involving them in less radicalizing communities like a book club or kdramas or actively engaging them with videos and articles you like.

it's really difficult to continuously expose yourself to people who parrot hateful rhetoric (even to people who don't realize they are parroting hateful rhetoric because they see it normalized all around them) but it is not possible to isolate yourself from everyone in your life, and i know many of you can't move out or don't want to. the next four years are going to be very difficult and you're going to want to put yourself in a place where you do not burn out. and while this is primarily directed at americans it also isn't because people all over the world watch and are affected by right-wing content, particularly misogyny, transphobia, homophobia and antisemitism. in fact i would say it travels even better than you think

but if you're serious about organizing and reaching out to people, and if you're serious about gearing up to "fight" or whatever you'd like to call it, you're going to need to meet people where they are. i also recognize that family is usually the most difficult place to start and not the easiest (contrary to what most people assume) so don't necessarily put yourself in a confrontational position because you will burn out quickly if you don't have your own space. in general don't put yourself in a confrontational position as a matter of habit. the key is to start conversations that can later allow for people to exit the current rabbitholes they descend into. you don't have to win any arguments, but you need to just keep conversations going, otherwise they accept their perspective as the truth. keep yourself safe but don't let yourself be cowed into silence, and recognize where people are cruel or just ignorant and remember that you can also be cruel and ignorant. and read! you're going to need to read.

[flowersfortheriot]

let me talk abt this for the first and last time because i still see people repeating this everywhere and i think people miss a really significant aspect of what happened this past year

arab votes didn't actually swing to trump in any notable way despite trump openly appealing to and campaigning for the arab and muslim community. most people understood this was a cynical move, and the "leaders" he paraded around are people who would have voted for him anyway and he simply did not give them a reason not to. some people also wanted to curry favor with him because they would need favorable connections in the event that he did win (this is called the arab despot approach).

but i think people who aren't arab or muslim don't understand what the democratic party actually did here

kamala and her staff rejected repeated offers from arab leaders to campaign for the dems. they sidelined rashida tlaib, their only palestinian rep, who still held GOTV campaigns and encouraged people to vote dem without explicitly endorsing harris because the entire biden admin iced her out once her people started being genocided. they also refused to appear with arab leaders and even elected officials who did endorse harris. they simply did not want their campaign to be perceived as a campaign arab or palestinian voters would endorse.

this is because the democratic party understood that they were campaigning on murdering muslims and arabs, and being associated with them might give the impression to the neocons they were courting that they were soft. this wasn't an accident, this was a calculation they made. they wanted to spurn those communities in order to win the votes of those who hate them and those who profit from their deaths.

there's a reason they didn't let a palestinian onstage at the DNC, there's a reason they sent bill clinton and ritchie torres to michigan, and there's a reason kamala could not express sympathy for palestinians without being careful to say "the greatest tragedy was october 7th" first. all the charades about the ceasefire and the two-state solution are for israel's benefit before they were for electoral benefit, because from the outset the democrats had made the decision not just to ignore muslim and arab voters, but to campaign on their suppression.

this is what people scolding arab and muslim voters miss: the dems were hoping to gain votes by spurning these communities both domestically (when it came to crushing and defaming pro-palestine supporters, michigan arabs, americans killed in palestine, lebanese americans they left stranded in lebanon) and abroad (they were campaigning on a more lethal military and launched a regional war in the middle east). biden's decision to support israel's insane escalation was not just incidental and ideological, it was part of a cold calculation made by the biden admin after 2022 to tie american economy and political power to interventionism regardless of global consequences, even as the atrocities mounted.

this wasn't something kamala could've (or was willing) to stop once the ball was rolling. this is a bipartisan consensus that underwrites the logic of the US as a world power. trump probably can stop it because he has the kind of mandate that allows him to make unilateral decisions like that, but he won't because he's not interested in it, hates iran, and he's well-paid by zionist and arab leaders who both have an interest in "reshaping" the middle east, as jake sullivan put it.

in the most cynical view, kamala didn't need to campaign on it the way she did. the US war machine remains unchanged and is usually not championed by democrats in such stark neocon terms. but kamala, as a woman of color facing accusations of "woke" wanted to double down on it so people understood she meant it. in other words, she was vice-signalling. kamala campaigned on the strength of this war machine, and demonstrated that by not giving an inch to the ideological enemies of this war machine—arabs, muslims, palestinians and their allies. her campaign in and of itself was designed to target these communities, from the cynical "what has palestine done for black people?" khive campaigns to "i'm speaking" to "if you don't like it, go vote for trump and see how you like the muslim ban." and you know it worked because even when she lost her supporters continue to vilify them and are openly calling for further violence against them and identifying them as traitors, backstabbers, and enemies.

islamophobia in the west is openly accepted, even hegemonic, and it's not potentially going to result in hate crimes, lynchings and deportations: it's already reached and passed that point long ago. but it also resulted in much worse. the US and the west have killed millions of muslims and arabs across the years. the US is currently carrying out a genocide of indigenous palestinians as we speak. i'm not speaking speculatively about the warnings of fascism, i'm speaking historically about the atrocities already committed against whole nations. hrw released the report of ethnic cleansing in gaza today and ohcr finally admitted israel's actions in gaza are consistent with genocide. this means the genocide has already been carried out for a while, which genocide conventions, US law, international humanitarian law, all the protestors since last october, and the international court of justice were supposed to prevent from happening ever again—but joe biden and his admin prevented any of that from stopping israel.

in this campaign in particular, kamala was running not only on the strength and triumph of the crimes previously committed against those people, but on the promise of crimes to be committed against those people, and the assurance that the domestic objection to those crimes will be thoroughly ignored. and she demonstrated that by ignoring that voting base. if they had tried to court them, it would have undermined her whole campaign. on the other hand, it undermined nothing for trump, who (for all of his flaws and open support for it) was not the one personally carrying out a genocide the past year.

once you understand this, you understand it wasn't a matter of "kamala promised a ceasefire and trump wanted to finish the job" or "vote blue no matter who." if you are not part of this community or the region that kamala was campaigning on destroying, you missed the point of her campaign. she wasn't trying to win their votes despite biden's genocide, she wasn't doing her best with things out of her control, and she wasn't making promises she wouldn't keep like trump. she was campaigning against us. for many other demographics, this was a campaign of faux joy and vague promises of protecting democracy. for the arab and muslim communities, this was a campaign where "protecting democracy" necessitated their families being slaughtered live on everyone's timelines and smearing the voters who had the audacity to ask for it to stop.

but to their credit, most of them still didn't vote for trump. they didn't believe him. they just sat it out. what else can you do? not only is the person running part of the admin killing your cousins, but they're also campaigning on excluding and vilifying you even if you want to vote for them.

i've said this before but a great majority of the people organizing for palestine were previous dem canvassers and local organizers. they arrested their own campaign infrastructure over the year and smeared them as hateful antisemites. they pretended they had only targeted arabs and muslims and 'hamas supporters' and kept the fact that most of those protestors were antizionist jews, students of color and regular kids out of mainstream media. their youth vote tanked but they still continue to pretend the genocide was not a factor in their loss.

despite that they make sure to stress that muslim and arab voters "voted for trump to punish harris" even though exit polls and election data show otherwise. this simply wasn't true, and she lost in all seven swing states. this is because she ran a campaign that vilified arabs and muslims, and the narrative now demands it. liberals want them perceived as having "punished" the american populace so the american populace punishes them while the US continues to massacre our region.

she lost, but her hateful campaign lingers. i think a lot of people find comfort in saying "you'll get what's coming to you" or "trump is gonna turn gaza into a parking lot" because violence against these communities is the status quo. they're scared of the uncertainty of what trump will do to america, but they're comfortable with what he might do to us. because that's some semblance of normality in an unstable time. america will change and trump will put your institutions to the test, but at least killing arabs will stay the same. and that was, in short, kamala harris's campaign pitch.

[flowersfortheriot]

i think people overestimate the extent to which beauty is a positive series (a presence of certain sought-after traits) rather than a negative one (an absence of certain punished traits) -- which is to say, beauty is currency in the sense that it is an exemption from punishment for possession of 'marked' characteristics. in this way often it grants privileges by guaranteeing a type of invisibility: protection from possession of a marked body, the ability to exist as more than a body. loss of this ability is the threat that a designation of 'beautiful' comprises.

[flowersfortheriot]

We will be banning the word "community" from political theory and forcing anarchists to describe a more complex plan than "hanging out with your buddies and giving them money sometimes"