Emma D

Goddamn Jimmy, this is some serious gourmet shit!

She/her. Socialist. Here to to doomscroll and for the occasional laugh.

[Layla Moran 🔶🕊️ @LaylaMoran]

It’s been a horrible few days. My family in the Catholic Church in Gaza city are reporting white phosphorous and gunfire into their compound. The bin collector and the janitor have been shot and their bodies are laying outside and remain uncollected. 1/2

[Mohammed El-Kurd @m7mdkurd]

Samer Abu Daqqa has passed away after bleeding for six hours. Israeli occupation forces prevented paramedics from reaching him after they targeted him by a reconnaissance missile.

[Eman Basher @SometimesPooh]

Hi, this is Eman. You might know me here as a gazan mom of three. I have lost a house, friends, family and students. I am now appealing to all the mothers in the world, Food is running out. We are sheltering in an UNRWA school. I have two sick children with no near hospitals or decent medical treatment in the area. Today, I have spent 3 hours looking for thick winter clothes for the children and I couldn’t find any. The things adults are facing and living are beyond catastrophic. Imagine what children go through. If there is any power in you, any thing you can do to talk or help in a permanent ceasefire, don’t stop! I am this close to losing my children to starvation, dehydration or sickness, If an Israeli sniper didn’t step first.

[Anealla @anealla]

Israel has rounded up kids, men and women in Gaza - stripping, blindfolding and handcuffing them, taking them in trucks for torture sessions in warehouses.

Two boys & a 40-year-old share their harrowing testimony.

@MaramGaza @LinahAlsaafin report

🧵

https://t.co/0cT3R6D8QE

[Flying_Rodent @flying_rodent]

I’d ask what forms of protest are acceptable for *actual Palestinians* to engage in at this point, because the full range of options appears to be “silently looking sad while Gaza gets wiped off the map”. I see that’s convenient for people who have no problem with that happening.

[Tom Capon @TomCapon]

Two and a half years ago we reported a leak in our living room roof to our landlord. This is what we are obligated to do via our rental agreement and he is, both morally and legally, obligated to sort it. He did nothing. In March of this year, the ceiling collapsed. 1/x

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Wilko's owners took £150m out of the business, leaving the pension fund £50m in deficit and the taxpayers with a £42m tab for the redundancies. And the Tories argue trade unionists are 'greedy' for not accepting pay cuts?

[Respond Crisis Translation @RespondCrisis]

This egregious mistranslation is not just a language error; it is a racist fabrication that fans the flames of the war.

The full video, including @BBC's erroneous English subtitles: https://t.co/1s4GqqVQgk

[Respond Crisis Translation @RespondCrisis]

A released Palestinian prisoner says in Arabic that Israel held them in the cold w/o electricity, "sprayed us w/ pepper spray" & "left us to die."

She never mentioned Hamas or a word like it. Yet @BBC translated to: "No one helped us. Only Hamas cared...We love them very much."

[Dr. Ghada Sasa, PhD 🇵🇸 @drghadasasa]

I am hearing that Ahmad Manasra may be finally freed in the hostage exchange 😭 Please, God, let this be true. Ahmad is a suicidal adolescent who has been imprisoned & tortured by the Israel occupation since he was 13 & held in solitary confinement since November 2021.

[Samplo Corvodina of Streatham @TreborRhurbarb]

I've fucked the family's end of the month financial balancing act. If anyone wants to "buy me a coffee" for my years of dedicated jestering that would be very much appreciated 🤡 https://t.co/qhZsNrZv15

[Liam O'Hare @Liam_O_Hare]

Dima is a former student at the University of Glasgow and stayed with my parents when she was in Scotland. She and her husband Mohammed had moved four times during the attack on Gaza and said last week that she hoped her son Abood would live to see brighter days.

[Dr. Rizwaan Sabir @RizwaanSabir]

Given how central racism & Islamophobia are to US foreign and security policy, this former advisor to the @StateDept and @WhiteHouse named Stuart Seldowitz is totally on message in this disgraceful, Islamophobic tirade targeted at a defenceless food vendor https://t.co/sPUIsG4Z2b

[Chłoddy @OfSymbols]

It’s because by and large they are not a “Corbyn fan club”. They are left wing. They believe that the ideological assumptions which currently dominate our political system are incapable of building a just society, or even a sustainable one. And that labour represent these.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

You can’t both-sides everything. You can’t live your life that way.

Yes it’s possible to see both sides of every contentious issue. You’re supposed to be able to do that; it’s a sign of intellectual maturity. If you can’t see both sides of an issue your relationship with abstract concepts is too rigid, and you’re probably lacking in empathy. It’s just a basic part of growing up to learn how to stand in other people’s shoes and see where they’re coming from.

But just because you can see both sides doesn’t mean you should live your life as though they’re both equally true, or as though they both have equal merit. If you want to have a truth-based relationship with reality it’s not enough to see both sides; you’ve got to grapple with it and figure out which side is more truthful, which side has more merit. You’re neglecting a whole dimensionality of understanding if you just leave it at “well I can see both sides so I have no responsibility to pick one”.

There’s a type of personality that has a strong attraction to feeling like it’s above the fray; like it’s detached from the disputes and dichotomies of the common riff raff, looking down at it all from a lofty place of transcendent understanding. Such people are, without exception, insufferable wankers.

If you want to be an authentic human being, you’ve got to get down in the muck where the humanness is happening. It’s good to understand that all concepts are relative and that none contain absolute truth, but this necessarily means that some concepts are more relatively truthful than others. And we need to be real with ourselves about that.

And if we’re honest with ourselves, none of us live our lives as though all things are the same and all concepts are equally true. We don’t get up in the morning and pour ourselves a cup of bleach, we pour ourselves some coffee every time. When we want to go to the store we take a specific route to get there, we don’t just head out in some random direction and hope for the best. We all make abundant use of relative truths in our day to day lives.

So why should issues like Israel-Palestine be any different? There are a lot of people who’ve heard both sides of the argument and are content to just leave it there with a shrug, either because they don’t want the social backlash that comes from from picking a side, or because they don’t want to experience the cognitive discomfort of facing difficult truths and re-orienting their worldview, or because they just enjoy feeling smugly above it all. None of those positions are worthy of respect, in my opinion.

People are dying. Our western governments are helping Israel kill them. This threatens to expand into a much larger war in the middle east, which could end up affecting us and people we know very directly. If you’re working hard and raising kids or whatever and have no time to grapple with issues of foreign policy that’s one thing, but if you’re just psychologically compartmentalizing away from this issue for your own comfort that’s quite another. That’s just living the life of a coward.

This isn’t even that hard. Israel-Palestine is easily the simplest and most straightforward conflict I’ve had to cover in the time I’ve been at this commentary gig, and the Gaza massacre in particular is even easier to understand. It doesn’t take long to get lucid about this thing.

If you’ve got the time and the psychological wherewithal to engage this subject then you should do so, and you should do so until you have figured out who is more right and who is more wrong, because this is very important. Get down off that fence and come join the rest of us here in the muck. Come and be an authentic human being.

[Aditya Chakrabortty @chakrabortty]

A man born without hands or legs has been told he will soon no longer get a daily visit from a care worker to help him shower and get dressed.
https://t.co/fFr42Y1jdh

[Save Our Citizenships @LetsStopC9]

TW// ETHNIC CLEANSING

For the second time inside a month, we are witnessing ethnic cleansing in the world, this time in Sudan. This follows what we witnessed in Rwanda in 1994 where 1 million Tutsi were murdered by Hutu militias.
1/

[Sana Saeed @SanaSaeed]

Another Palestinian journalist - another thread that connects us to Gaza - has been killed. We’ve lost just too, too many.

Innalilahi wa Innalilahi raji’un.

[KWAJO- Social Issues Campaigner @Kwajotweneboa]

Thousands of babies and toddlers falling sick from damp homes in Britain, NHS doctor warn.

31,000 (age 4 & under) admitted to hospital with respiratory virus

520,000 rented properties "risk to health"

Housing “now a crucial issue for child health” https://t.co/yIoYfdXeYk