bilal

[Hoop Central @TheHoopCentral]

Victor Wembanyama arrives for Game 6.

(via @NBA)

[KENNY BEECHAM @KOT4Q]

Okay Bilal, you got my attention

[NFL @NFL]

A;FK;JD;KJF;LAKEJFLKJVAL;KEJL;JF;EFJ;LFAKJ

JAYDEN DANIELS HAIL MARY! @COMMANDERS WIN!

[Ashtyn Butuso @lil_buts]

Oh Robert Saleh wears a lebanon flag and suddenly he's fired? prob nothing

[SportsCenter @SportsCenter]

DMV STAND UP 🗣️

JAYDEN DANIELS HAS THE COMMANDERS OUT TO THEIR BEST START IN 16 YEARS 🔥

[bilal @bilaller9]

@20Kylies Lmfaoooo 💀

[The Olympic Games @Olympics]

ARSHAD NADEEM 🇵🇰 SETS A NEW OLYMPIC RECORD IN THE MEN'S JAVELIN! 😱

[Apple TV @AppleTV]

Like you never left.

Severance returns 1.17.25

[Nate Mook @natemook]

Zomi was one of the earliest employees at World Central Kitchen. She first showed up to volunteer at our WCK kitchen in Guatemala after the Fuego volcano eruption—and became like family. Zomi was effervescent, her spirit of service embodied the greatest aspects of humanity. Anyone who meets Zomi never forgets her huge smile and warm laugh. When others were facing the darkest of moments, Zomi was a shining light of comfort, and the world is a dimmer place without her. 💔

[bilal @bilaller9]

@LailaAlarian they changed the title now too lol

[MSF International @MSF]

🔴BREAKING

Jenin, West Bank: Israeli forces just shot and killed an unarmed teenage boy inside Khalil Suleiman hospital compound. Efforts to save his life from MSF and Ministry of Health doctors were in vain...

[Abdalhadi Alijla عبد الهادي العجلة @alijla2021]

The last message of MD Hamam before he was killed. Listen to it carefully and remember his name.

[bilal @bilaller9]

its so soul crushing seeing folks do mental gymnastics to justify the collective strangulation of so many beautiful souls with their own stories, loves, and hopes..so many victims to the insidious structures that require dehumanization and apathy

[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.

[bilal @bilaller9]

@ShubmanGang @CricCrazyJohns Cry more

[bilal @bilaller9]

@theneedledrop Baltimore Anthem

[bilal @bilaller9]

@Cool17Haha @wildtiktokss 🤦🏽‍♂️