John Long Shanks

Bimshire, 01442-Crew, seeking connection over perfection & looking forward with a loving smile..
🌊🏄🏼‍♂️🧘🏼‍♂️🙏🏼
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[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

One of the best stands at the 2026 RHS Chelsea Flower Show is the one from Barbados 👏

They bring such vivid colours to #RHSChelsea

[Farida Bemba Nabourema @Farida_N]

Who Abolished Slavery?

You think there is no correlation between how we Africans have been engineered to look down on ourselves and to genuflect before those who oppressed us?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Who abolished slavery? Ask any fourth grader in Togo, and the answer comes without hesitation: Victor Schoelcher. Wake me from a deep sleep with that question, and my subconscious will answer before my eyes are open: Victor Schoelcher. Twenty-five years after leaving primary school, the colonial curriculum still lives in me like a reflex.

That is what was planted, and that is how thoroughly it took root. It is only the adult brain, the one lucky enough to stumble upon other literatures, other histories, other archives, that comes afterward to contest the first answer. But the first answer is always his name.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

That is what colonial schools taught. That is what post-colonial schools taught. That is what is still being taught today, by people placed in power precisely to ensure that the curriculum of self-erasure continues undisturbed.

Because in Francophone Africa, the abolition of slavery has one face, and it is this French man. And in twenty years of academic formation on this continent, from primary school through university, including my own years as a history major at the University of Lome, not once, not in a single classroom, not in a single textbook, was the Haitian Revolution mentioned.

Not once were we told that enslaved Black people organized, fought, and defeated the French army, that Haïti became the first Black nation in colonial Americas and the first nation in modern history to defeat a European power that practiced slavery through the resistance of the very people it had enslaved. Twenty years of “schooling”: not one mention of that historical fact. And this is just one example, on just one subject.

Because not once throughout my entire education in Togo was I introduced to a Black mathematician, a Black physicist, a Black inventor, a Black philosopher. Not once. But for those of us who were cursed with France, the French apparently discovered more than 70% of world knowledge and wrote more than 80% of the world’s books, because our curriculum was designed to make us believe that the smartest, most resourceful, most intellectually gifted humans to have ever walked the surface of this earth were French. When the data actually tells you that France contributes approximately 2% of the world’s scientific innovation. Two percent. And we were built, from childhood, to worship that two percent as the totality of human genius. I imagine the same arithmetic applied to British, or Portuguese colonies, just with a different flag. This just one subject. There are decades of damage underneath it, layered and compounding.

Which is why it is genuinely exhausting to wake up every single day and be expected to debate, with patience and good faith, people who were produced by these laboratories of engineered ignorance and who are entirely convinced that what was done to their minds was an education.

[Joe Hudson @FU_joehudson]

How to be more emotionally intelligent (without trying so hard)

🧵 for @threadapalooza

[Moon of Alabama @MoonofA]

The Moral Bankruptcy of the West
John J. Mearsheimer
https://t.co/wNXSqmDtHM

[Dimitri Lascaris @dimitrilascaris]

Professor John Mearsheimer:

“On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watchissued a 179-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“On 5 December 2024, Amnesty Internationalissued a 296-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

“On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice found that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza…

“Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.

“Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.

“Moreover, almost all of the many human rights advocates in those countries, and in the West more generally, have stayed silent while Israel executed its genocide. The mainstream media has made hardly any effort to expose and challenge what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Indeed some key outlets have staunchly supported Israel’s actions.

“One wonders what people in the West who have either supported Israel’s genocide or remained silent tell themselves to justify their behavior and sleep at night.

“History will not treat them kindly.”

[Dr Jay Watts @Shrink_at_Large]

What if we stopped calling it 'borderline personality disorder' and started calling it what it often is: survival patterns from unmet needs, trauma, misrecognition and rejection.

#TraumaNotPD

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Noam Chomsky explaining why Palestine has so little support.

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

This is Joe Biden’s legacy. Kamala Harris’s legacy. Keir Starmer’s legacy. David Lammy’s legacy.

Nothing else matters. They are repulsive war criminals doused in the blood of thousands upon thousands of dead and mutilated children.

[Tamam @TamamBeitJirja]

🧵Today marks International Human Solidarity Day, a reminder that solidarity transcends borders, ethnicity, religion, skin color etc.

[In Context @incontextmedia]

“When I was in Gaza, I felt like it was the prelude to the end of humanity.”

Tanya Haj Hassan gives chilling testimony to the UN about what she witnessed as a doctor who volunteered in Gaza.

[Seth Abramson @SethAbramson]

@Goldsh0es @UNSEATpac @ShotgunZen EVIDENCE28/ So, here's what we know (in addition to my prior here's-what-we-know tweet):

(4) The period of time investigators should be looking at is from when Trump left his golf course at 2PM on December 23 to when he began his "NORAD calls" (4PM on December 24). So, 26 hours.

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

Gaza has awakened the world.

This is a genocide made in Washington and everyone can see it.

The empire has never been more exposed.

The door is ajar. We have to kick it in👇

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

"This embargo is a flagrant violation of international law"

Jamaica calls for an end to Americas illegal economic embargo of Cuba & expresses its unwavering solidarity with the Cuban govt and its people #DropTheBlockade

[Gerston Blenman @GerstonB]

It’s genetics actually , for example if your mother or father has a sister that has extremely small feet but measures 6 foot, that’s a case of Lack Toes n Taller Aunts .

[Darii @Prince_darii]

This is Barbados where school stabbing at Graydon Sealy makes headlines but an incident where school children bring school ( different school), their parent edibles and were so high they were stripping naked never even make a news column. Well done 👏🏾

[80s Kidz @80s_Kidz]

Who had one?

[The Blindboy Podcast @bbboatclub]

RIP to a legend. He played bass on Lou Reeds “walk on the wild side”. He recorded the part twice on electric and upright, one octave above the other, just so he’d get paid twice. But inadvertently created one of the most memorable bass melodies of all time by doing so

[Abby Martin @AbbyMartin]

Israel bombed the entrance of Al-Fakhoura School, a designated “safe zone” for children to get the polio vaccine. My friend’s baby nephew, who was scheduled for vaccination today, is now internally bleeding from shrapnel in his spine/lungs. “It’s the same lie & mockery by Israel”