#people of determination

[gilanimobility]

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[bayt-alhaziin]

"Will you stay?"

"As long as you want me to."

Ugghhhhh! That hurt so much. I'm sobbing my eyes out. Obviously I didn't have to watch it since, I'm definitely in Will's place in my life too. At least he had both of his parents and his beloved one beside him when he decided to end it. For me, I'll be all alone, for I chose it and, I'm grateful that I'll still have Taashi, Ray & his family beside me for when I decide to end it again. I wish I could also say that I've loved my life, as much as I've been so privileged with so much - all this education, luxury and, affordability. I'm indeed grateful yet, I don't love my life anymore. I don't see a point in splurging on these medicines and, all the O2 being wasted on me. I wish I had something to look forward to. I can't chose when I have no options left.

[howtothriveinanursinghome]

40 days from now is the 8th anniversary of my spinal cord injury. The end of my 8 mile road, so to speak. Because I am of course in love with Eminem.

I’m eating small handfuls of dried blueberries. I wish I could eat the world.

I have a good sense of humor, so plenty of times in the last 8 years I have thought of my abandoned in a nursing home paralyzed life as a crafty simulation and so ‘hilarious’ and ‘not real’.

Oh but these 8 years have been the cruelest and most romantic years of Sheryn’s lifetime. Because of course I have past lives. You wouldn’t believe how many lives my soul has shared with humanity. These lives are coming back to me.

I want to absorb my past selves karma, but right now I’m stagnant and having trouble convincing myself some fresh water in my pond would feel good and encourage lake-ness.

Naturally I’m laying awake thinking about the future of our species at 12:30am.

Oh my. It’s already too late.

[akanemnon]

We didn't even get an answer, and we never will (at least it's not determination)

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MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[trans-axolotl]

nothing makes me more insane than the phrase "selling your body" btw. like was i not also selling my body at every other job i've had where i had to be on my feet all day, lifting boxes, working in a warehouse, etc. why is it that sex work is uniquely labeled as "selling your body" while every other job is sorted into another category, no matter how much that job might have a physical impact on your body. lmao.

[teaboot]

do u think physical build is an important part of being security? im 5'5 and think i look very timid, but ive seen some entry level security job listings around me that ive been interested in.

I've only been private security for around five years, so I'm still relatively green compared to my colleagues, but I personally am about 5'3" and I've been doing great!

And again, I'm not incredibly experienced, but if I were to make a hire, I'd be prioritizing a number of things before considering height.

Physically you need to be capable of doing your duties without pain- so if you have chronic pain, foot patrol may not be your bag, but CCTV monitoring might work. If you can't drive, being a site manager may not work, but working door duty somewhere local might be.

Physical presence- in regards to 'looking timid'- is something that you can work on if you want to, but sometimes an unassuming appearance is your advantage.

A "problem demographic" (using HEAVY quotations there) for a lot of places like malls and downtown areas is adult women with trauma, addiction, and mental health issues- they're seen by a lot of clients as "crazy ladies" and treated less like people by the general public, and a good number have very good reason not to trust men ESPECIALLY in uniform, but are more often than not perfectly easy to get along with if you're polite, respectful, and don't come off as a threat or authority figure. Being able to offer menstrual products and having resources around the area you can recommend is good, too.

And if I HAVE to move people out from behind buildings and such, saying "fuck off asshole" like folks imagine is NOT as effective as "Hey, sorry, this area is restricted, but here are some other places that might be okay- I need to do another check in about an hour, so heads up, and the church up the street is doing hot chocolate right now".

Really, if you want to do well in security- at least basic work- I'd say you want to focus on the following:

Wear your uniform and keep it tidy

Show up prepared and on time

Be able to approach strangers and talk to them

Keep a positive, non-agressive attitude, and be willing to give people the benefit of the doubt

Learn deescalation techniques to diffuse conflict

Have a strong handle on your personal emotions and opinions

Kerp calm and rational in an emergency

Learn basic first aid and get certified if you can, it's not technically necessary but I've used that more than I'd like to admit

Keep a strong moral compass

Really, I'd say it boils down to keeping to your sense of ethics, showing up on time, and knowing how to follow orders with nuanced interpretation.

Beyond that, you're golden

[zodiac-monkey]

[sluttylittlewaste]

"Vax coming back wouldn't be narratively satisfying!" is a take I keep seeing so it's time for my daily reminder:

This narrative does not exist to satisfy you.

This is a group of people you don't know who have been kind enough to share their personal, deeply emotional DnD campaigns will an audience. If Matthew Mercer decides that its worth it to let his friends have a happily ever after including Vax - you're just gonna have to suck it up. If it bothers you so much that you have to write full-length essays on Tumblr, or, god forbid , harass the CAST, go make some friends and run your own campaign. Or write a fucking fanfic.

[infiniteglitterfall]

Someone on Reddit made the mistake of saying, "Teach me how this conflict came about" where I could see it.

Let me teach you too.

The common perception is that Jews came out of nowhere, stole Palestinian homes and kicked Palestinians out of them, and then bombed them for 75 years, until they finally rebelled in the form of Hamas invading Israel and massacring 22 towns in one day.

The historical reality is that Jews have lived there continuously for at least 3500 years.

There are areas, like Meggido iirc, with archeological evidence of continuous habitation for 7,000 years, but Jewish culture as we recognize it today didn't develop until probably halfway through that.

Ethnic Jews are the indigenous people of this area.

Indigeneity means a group was originally there, before any colonization happened, and that it has retained a cultural connection to the land. History plus culture.

That's what Jews have: even when the diaspora became larger than the number of Jews in Israel, the yearning to return to that homeland was a daily part of Jewish prayer and ritual.

The Jewish community in Israel was crushed pretty violently by the Roman Empire in 135 CE, but it was still substantial, sometimes even the majority population there, for almost a thousand years.

The 600s CE brought the advent of Islam and the Arab Empire, expanding out from Saudi Arabia into Israel and beyond. It was largely a region where Jews were second-class citizens. But it was still WAY better than the way Christian Europe treated Jews.

From the 700s-900s, the area saw repeated civil wars, plagues, and earthquakes.

Then the Crusades came, with waves of Christians making "pilgrimages to the Holy Land" and trying to conquer it from Muslims and Jews, who they slaughtered and enslaved.

Israel became pretty well depopulated after all that. It was a very rough time to live there. (And for the curious, I'm calling it Israel because that's what it had been for centuries, until the Romans erased the name and the country.)

By the 1800s, the TOTAL population of what's now Israel and Palestine had varied from 150,000 - 275,000 for centuries. It was very rural, very sparsely populated, on top of being mostly desert.

In the 1880s, Jews started buying land and moving back to their indigenous homeland. As tends to happen, immigration brought new projects and opportunities, which led to more immigration - not only from Jews, but from the Arab world as well.

Unfortunately, there was an antisemitic minority spearheaded by Amin al-Husseini. Who was very well-connected, rich, and from a politically powerful family.

Al-Husseini had enthusiastically participated in the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Then the Empire fell in World War One, and the League of Nations had to figure out what to do with its land.

Mostly, if an area was essentially operating as a country (e.g. Turkey), the League of Nations let it be one. In areas that weren't ready for self-rule, it appointed France or Britain to help them get there.

In recognition of the increased Jewish population in their traditional, indigenous homeland, it declared that that homeland would again become Israel.

As in, the region was casually called Palestine because that was the lay term for "the Holy Land." It had not been a country since Israel was stamped out; only a region of a series of different empires. And the Mandate For Palestine said it was establishing "a national home of the Jewish people" there, in recognition of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."

Britain was appointed to help the Arab and Jewish communities there develop systems of self-government, and then to work together to govern the region overall.

At least, that was the plan.

Al-Husseini, who was deeply antisemitic, did not like this plan.

And, extra-unfortunately, the British response to al-Husseini inciting violent anti-Jewish riots was to put him in a leadership role over Arab Palestine.

They thought it would calm him down and perhaps satisfy him.

They were very wrong.

He went on to become a huge Hitler fanboy, and then a Nazi war criminal. He co-created the Muslim Brotherhood - which Hamas is part of - with fellow fascist fanboy Hassan al-Banna.

He got Nazi Party funding for armed Muslim Brotherhood militias to attack Jews and the Brits in the late 30s, convincing Britain to agree to limit Jewish immigration at the time when it was most desperately needed.

He started using the militias again in 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide the mandated land into a Jewish homeland and a Palestinian one.

Al-Husseini wouldn't stand for a two-state solution. He was determined to tolerate no more than the subdued, small Jewish minority of second-class citizens that he remembered from his childhood.

As armed militias increasingly ran riot, the Arab middle and upper classes increasingly left. About 100,000 left the country before May 1948, when Britain was to pull out, leaving Israel and Palestine to declare their independence.

The surrounding nations didn't want war. They largely accepted the two-state solution.

But al-Husseini lobbied HARD. And by mobilizing the Muslim Brotherhood to provide "destabilizing mass demonstrations and a murderous campaign of intimidation," he got the Arab League nations to agree to invade, en masse, as soon as Britain left.

About 600,000 Arabs fled to those countries during the ensuing war.

Jews couldn't seek refuge there; in fact, most of those countries either exiled their Jews directly, confiscating their property first, or else made Jewish life unlivable and exploited them for underpaid or slave labor for years first.

By the time the smoke cleared and a peace treaty was signed, most of the Arab Palestinian community had fled; there was no Arab Palestinian leadership; many of the refugees' homes and businesses had left had been destroyed in the war; and Israel had been flooded with nearly a million refugees from the Arab League countries and the Holocaust - even more people than had fled the war.

That was the Nakba. The one that gets portrayed as "750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled!" in the hope that you'll assume they were expelled en masse, their beautiful intact homes all stolen.

Egypt had taken what's now the Gaza Strip in that war, and Jordan took what's now the West Bank - expelling or killing all the Jews in it first.

(Ironically, Jordan was originally supposed to be part of Israel. Britain, inexplicably, cut off what would have been 75% of its land to create Jordan.

Even more inexplicably, nobody ever talks about it. I've never seen anyone complain that Jordan was stolen from Palestinians. Possibly because Jordan is also the only country that gave Palestinian refugees full citizenship, and it's about half Palestinian now.

Israel is nearly 25% Arab Palestinians with full citizenship and equal rights, so it's not all that different -- but the fundamental difference of living in a country where the majority is Jewish, not Muslim, probably runs pretty deep.)

Anyway: that's why Palestine is Gaza and the West Bank, rather than being some contiguous chunk of land. Or being the land set aside by the U.N. in 1947.

Because Arab countries took that land in 1948, and treated them as essentially separate for 20 years.

Israel got them back, along with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, in the next war: 1967, when Egypt committed an act of war by taking control of the waterways and barring Israel from them. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel.

Israel tried to give back the Gaza Strip at the same time. Egypt refused.

Palestine finally declared independence in 1988.

But Hamas formed at about the same time. Probably in response, in fact. Hamas is fundamentally opposed to peace negotiations with Israel.

Again: Hamas is part of a group founded by Nazis.

Hamas has its own charter. It explains that Jews are "the enemy," because they control the drug trade, have been behind every major war, control the media, control the United Nations, etc. Basic Nazi rhetoric.

It has gotten adept at masking that rhetoric for the West. But to friendlier audiences, its leaders have consistently said things like, "People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels.  Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels."

(Palestinians were outraged by this speech. Palestinians, by and large, absolutely loathe Hamas.

It's just that it's not the same to say that to locals, as it is to say it where major global powers who oppose this crap can hear you.)

Hamas has stated from the beginning that its mission is to violently destroy Israel and take over the land.

It has received $100M in military funding annually, from Iran, for several years. Because Iran has been building a network of fascist, antisemitic groups across the Middle East, in a blatant attempt to control more and more of it: Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen.

Iran has been run by a very far-right, deeply antisemitic dictatorship for decades now, which pretty openly wants to take down both Israel and the U.S.

Last year, Iran increased Hamas's funding to $350M.

The "proof of concept" invasion of Israel that Hamas pulled off on October 7th more than justifies a much bigger investment.

Hamas has publicly stated its intention to attack "again and again and again," until Israel has been violently destroyed.

That is how this conflict came about.

A Nazi group seized power in Gaza in 2007 by violently kicking the Palestinian government out, and began running it as a dictatorship, using it to build money and power in preparations for exactly this.

And people find it shockingly easy to believe its own hype about being "the Palestinian resistance."

As well as its propaganda that Israel is not actually targeting Hamas: it's just using a literal Nazi invasion and massacre as an excuse to randomly commit genocide of the fraction of Palestine it physically left 20 years ago.

Despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza have been protesting HAMAS throughout the war.

[alizalayne]

it's so amusing that when you're an author who is like any minority, you have this caveat where if your book gets banned, you kinda have to mentally acknowledge whether it was banned by Bruce, the one really bigoted guy who wastes everyone's time in florida. idk how bruce is doing. you don't need to learn who he is really which is why im not using his surname. but if you have a book out commercially, bruce has probably written "damaged souls" on a form about you. so there's a street cred element to all this like did people really have a vendetta against your work...? or was it just bruce again

[gilanimobility]

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[bayt-alhaziin]

Extremely daring of me to watch me before you with a mindset which is already a mess.

[ratxiety]

He has a really good arm

[faeriefully]

no, girl im fine— I’m just crying over the gospel again

[queruloustea]

a soaked dust (and bapy) sheltering beneath a leaf :]

[serenityquest]