Lauren Pyott

Maker of things, user of words and ruminator seeking radical politics in the Highlands of Scotland. sun’lun til I die.

[Tiberius @tiberiusfiles]

This story is insane. The BBC just changed a direct quote — meaning one of them is a lie.

Consider the options: either the BBC lied that someone said they were happy for an atomic bomb to strike their city, or they softened that clearly psychopathic language but kept that quote in as if the source is credible.

Either the BBC is manufacturing consent to use atomic bombs, or they’re happy to platform someone else who did so.

No sane person says they’re OK being in the city an atomic bomb hits, obviously. That goes without saying. But the BBC thinks this is valid reporting.

Western media institutions like this deserve to die.

[Lauren Pyott @LaurenPyott]

I’m possibly the most northerly #SAFC season ticket holder (in the Scottish Highlands) and happily travel the 7 plus hours to see us play at home. But that will end if Farage is welcomed to the SoL. He stands against everything I love about this club, this city, this community.

[Omar Hamad | عُـمَـرْ 𓂆 @OmarHamadD]

We are on the verge of completing the preparation of the first library after the genocide.

Three weeks of exhaustion, effort, organization, and hard work, my friend @IamIbrahim21 and I, to bring this project to life in the best possible way.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the success of this project, and thank you to all who stood with us and believed in our dreams of rebuilding the idea of education in Gaza.

Join us and be part of the library’s success.

[Angelo Giuliano 🇨🇭🇮🇹 @angeloinchina]

This is Caracas today.
Huge crowds in support of President Maduro.

You won't see this in mainstream media.

[VoxUmmah @VoxUmmah]

In the coming hours and days there will be a lot of disinformation and misinformation regarding Venezuela.

We recommend the following for accurate news and analysis: @venanalysis @OrinocoTribune @KawsachunNews @sov_media

[Lauren Pyott @LaurenPyott]

@ewangibbs So am I!

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

I came back today. I thought I had known despair before, but what I saw today is beyond despair.
It is not grief, nor horror, nor pain. It is something colder, a stillness where even God seems to have withdrawn His hand.

The sky was impossibly blue. The kind of blue that mocks you, that makes you wonder whether beauty itself is a crime.
I walked through streets that no longer exist, streets that were my childhood.
They are now a wilderness of stone, wire, and dust.

A man stood on a heap, a neighbor, I think.
He pointed and said, “It’s here.”
I asked him how far.
He looked down.
And I understood: my house was beneath his feet.

I lifted my phone, as if the machine could recognize what I could not. The screen glowed; there was nothing to see. The earth had swallowed the distances. Even the smell of home was gone. It was as if the thread connecting me to life itself had been cut.

I dug with my hands. The dust burned. My palms bled.
My mother had told me: “Search for anything we can save.” And so I obeyed her like a son obeys the last voice that still believes there is meaning in obedience.

From a house that once cost my father one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, a lifetime of labor, of hope, of decency, I found two things:
a knife, and a pillow.

Two relics of civilization. One for necessity, one for illusion.
That is what remains of man.

I sat in the ruins, the blue of my shirt turned gray with ash, and I thought:
this is the end not of a city, but of meaning itself.

I thought of my parents, their hands, their faith in honest work.
How will they bear this? How will any man bear seeing his father’s roof turned into dust by a stranger’s hands, hands that will never know the names of those they destroyed?

But what tears me apart more than ruin is silence. No one speaks to us.
No one tells us where to go, who will rebuild, or who is responsible.
The politicians talk of victories, the generals of strategy, the world of peace and progress.
But none of them live here among the ashes. None of them stand where I stand, sifting through their own dead.

And those who claim to represent us, where are they? Where is the money they collected in our name, the promises they made before the cameras, the slogans they wrote while we buried our children?
Who among them will come to this ruin and say: Forgive us, we failed you?
Not one.

They sit in offices with clean shirts, counting our corpses as figures on paper. They say “reconstruction,” “aid,” “negotiations,” as though the vocabulary of power could fill the emptiness of a mother’s bed.

I tell you the truth: there is no crime greater than indifference.
The murderer at least acknowledges the victim.
But those who look away, they kill the soul itself.

I brushed the dust from my shirt, though I knew it was useless.
I wanted to see if there was still color left in the world.
There wasn’t.
The blue had become the color of mourning.

I looked at my hands. They were shaking, not from fear, but from the unbearable realization that we have become expendable to the world.
Our suffering is entertainment, our death a policy, our endurance a statistic.

I wept then, openly, shamelessly.
I, who once believed in the dignity of suffering, now see that dignity itself has been annihilated.
There is nothing noble in being forgotten.

If you are reading this, do not admire the style or the language.
Lower your head, and weep.
Because this dust, this silence, this cry, is what remains of us.

[Dr.Motaz🍉🇵🇸 @MotazSaleh2001]

Let’s break the algorithm — reply with a dot.

Eyes on the sumud flotilla.

At least share don't stay silent !!!!

[Lauren Pyott @LaurenPyott]

@sana2 ألف ألف مبروك!!!!

[Lauren Pyott @LaurenPyott]

@hmd_mhmd9832 Free Palestine

[Lauren Pyott @LaurenPyott]

@roversnewss أكيد!

[Lauren Pyott @LaurenPyott]

@RevoltMediaX Where’s Regis Le Bris?

[Matt Zarb-Cousin @mattzarb]

I don’t know what has made some people think otherwise, but the IDF is not a protected characteristic

[İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي @iyad_elbaghdadi]

@Kawaakibi We do not forget
We do not forgive
We do not stop fighting
We fight for everyone
Nobody gets left behind
We're not free until we're all free
We're not safe until we're all safe

[Lauren Pyott @LaurenPyott]

@ahmedshameya995 الله يرحمه 🙏

[Lauren Pyott @LaurenPyott]

Shameless addict of the @WhatTheFalkPod podcast! We live in the Scottish Highlands and it’s our sun’lun lifeline. Best #safc pod and genuinely the biggest highlight of our week. Please don’t stop, we’d honestly be at a loss without it!

[CJ Werleman @cjwerleman]

🧵 14 slide thread by brilliant Syrian activist Tareq Tamr.

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

Many things can be true at the same time.

We can be happy that the Baathist regime in Syria has fallen while also holding space for concerns about the future of Syria’s sovereignty and diversity under HTS.

We can recognize the greed and gruesome brutality of the Assad family while also being honest about the murderous sectarian record of Mohammad Al Jolani/Ahmad al Sharaa in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

We can condemn the way the Syrian regime under Baath rule hollowed out the country, turned it into a narco state and refused to lessen the brutality while also being honest about the 14 year multi billion dollar US-led regime change war that helped destroy Syria.

We can celebrate the end of the Syrian torture and death dungeons while also condemning the Israeli destruction of Syria’s military and the expansionist “greater Israel” land grab in the Golan.

And we can absolutely call out HTS for signaling potential normalization with Israel and what it means for regional resistance, while also understanding Syria’s new government is new and we have no choice but to wait and see.

There’s room for nuance, there always has been.

[İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي @iyad_elbaghdadi]

Here's a personal thread about the very strong, complex emotions that I struggled with all of last week, since we watched Assad fall and Syria rise:

[Lauren Pyott @LaurenPyott]

Incredibly important thread with insight and advice from @4Bassam for anyone writing about Syria now and thinking about its future. Don’t oversimplify and don’t let geopolitical analysis overshadow views of Syrians themselves.

[Bassam Haddad @4Bassam]

Short / dull #Thread on Knowledge Production on Syria: beyond the profound relief Syrians feel after the dictator ran away without a word, we found ourselves, and will keep finding ourselves for some time to come, reconstructing events and understandings of what transpired before and since November 27. But we keep falling into the fallacy of making discoveries fit our narratives. This is at some level unavoidable but can be mitigated if we can keep a few precursors in mind, especially during the first two weeks after November 27. 1/7