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within the past hour the NYPD raided Colombia university where no press is currently being allowed btw

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oh yes it's that time of year

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"Here are your tortured poets. All from Mahmoud Darwish to Dr. Refat Alareer to Khaled Juma, these are tortured poets. Tortured by longing for a home they can never return to, tortured by the world they were born to for BEING BORN. Palestine, home to the tortured poets department." [@/folkoftheshelf on X. April 20th, 2024.]

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Someone Worte that he could not stand to see the Palestine flag anymore.

Sorry, but not sorry

Reblog daily

Free Palestine

I am not done yet

Only way to stop seeing this flag is when the oppression is over.

So you are tiered of this you can end it, stop supporting Zionism!

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just a reminder!

Your $12 could get someone in Sudan an emergency kit, Your $20 can get the clinics Equipment and your $50 can help keep the clinics running. Support Medglobal today!!!

https://x.com/sitcomabed/status/1763663728942141849?s=20

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Please follow, share, and interact with Madleen @palestinianmother's videos on tiktok to help bring more awareness to her campaign. Here is the link to her tiktok page:

Please also share her gfm link and donate if you can:

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instead of continuously over-donating to ao3 when those running the site are racist zionist sympathisers who shut down support of palestine from its volunteers 1 / 2 (among myriad other issues that u should NOT be funding) please direct your attention to these incomplete fundraisers for people in gaza and various tangible operations doing work. this is a call that if u have donated even a cent to ao3 to a) match that in your donations to palestinians/causes and b) stop donating so uncritically and unconditionally to ao3, pressure them. id like to direct u to @end-otw-racism

fundraiser masterpost by @el-shab-hussein

mona

care for gaza

help gaza's children

operation olive branch

the palestinian children's relief fund

unrwa

the palestinian red crescent society

buy an e-sim / donate for mass buying

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Do not forget about Palestinians on this Eid, do not forget about Gaza, do not forget about the lives taken and homes destroyed, do not forget about the joy and life so cruelly snatched from them.

Eid means to us what Christmas means to most of you. And they're spending it digging through rubble and locating bodies to burry.

They have no chocolates, no new clothes to wear, no homes to decorate, they lost loved ones which would gather together, no Eidi to give to children to make them happy, no mehndi, no jewelery, no new toys.

Do not forget about Palestine.

Keep boycotting for them, keep protesting for them, keep donating to the families through the link tree, keep buying e-sims for them, keep sharing the truth, keep exposing Israel for their consistent humanitarian crimes.

Remember the Palestinians, especially today, on Eid, an occasion of joy.

May Allah make it joyous for them after everything they had suffered, may they be free from the Zionist occupation and genocide

Eid Mubarak, to everyone, and to the Palestinians

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Do you guys ever listen to a song from the 80s and think, if I did coke and listened to this song, my brain would finally be satisfied. Like my brain would finally reach whatever it’s been searching for all this time and I could finally rest and not have 80 million little voices in my head all the time.

#rambles #just a thought

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"And I think its a really fearful time for young writers with a bellyful of fire. It's a fearful time cos if you listen to the voices (the market forces, the distractions) you're not going to get fire out of you, you're going to get water out of you. But for godssake, I want you to get fire out of you and that's why we've been having this conversation, to reawaken the fire, the wonder, the splendour, the misery, the mystery, why is it we write?

We don't write to be polite on the page. We don't write to get nods in the mind. We write to explode the inner rooms of people. So that the rooms in which they read, opens out into the whole world and they feel the radiance touching everybody and they can feel for one moment, that they can be anything or nothing if they chose to be, but just to be hit by that extraordinary vigour and power that a true piece of writing - whether its a sonnet, whether it's a poem of four lines by Rilke, whether it's a short story by your beloved Chekov, whether it's a punch by Toni Morrison or a head-butt by Ralph Ellison, that's what we want. We want the raw, fire.

(Thats what we were trying to contribute to here) you shouldn't pay any attention to the market forces, we should write from our spirits, whether that gets published, I don't know how we break that hegemony, I don't know how we do that. (how do you get a contract? how do you pay your bills? how do you pay your rent? how do you feed your children? - There was a time when writers formed co-operatives and published each others works, that's gone now that's all disappeared) He (Cornel) talks about being a prisoner of hope, me too, as far as literature."

Ben Okri in conversation with Cornell West, University of Cambridge, 2013

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Dylan Thomas ― Do not go gentle into that good night

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i don’t mean to be political, but what if everyone had basic human rights

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on ao3's current fundraiser

apparently it’s time for ao3’s biannual donation drive, which means it’s time for me to remind you all, that regardless of how much you love ao3, you shouldn’t donate to them because they HAVE TOO MUCH MONEY AND NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH IT.

we’ve known for years that ao3 – or, more specifically, the organization for transformative works (@transformativeworks on tumblr), or otw, who runs ao3 and other fandom projects – has a lot of money in their “reserves” that they had no plans for. but in 2023, @manogirl and i did some research on this, and now, after looking at their more recent financial statements, i’ve determined that at the beginning of 2024, they had almost $2.8 MILLION US DOLLARS IN SURPLUS.

our full post last year goes over the principles of how we determined this, even though the numbers are for 2023, but the key points still stand (with the updated numbers):

when we say “surplus”, we are not including money that they estimate they need to spend in 2024 for their regular expenses. just the extra that they have no plan for

yes, nonprofits do need to keep some money in reserves for emergencies; typically, nonprofits registered in the u.s. tend to keep enough to cover between six months and two years of their regular operating expenses (meaning, the rough amount they need each month to keep their services going). $2.8 million USD is enough to keep otw running for almost FIVE YEARS WITHOUT NEW DONATIONS

they always overshoot their fundraisers: as i’m posting this, they’ve already raised $104,751.62 USD from their current donation drive, which is over double what they’ve asked for! on day two of the fundraiser!!

no, we are not trying to claim they are embezzling this money or that it is a scam. we believe they are just super incompetent with their money. case in point: that surplus that they have? only earned them $146 USD in interest in 2022, because only about $10,000 USD of their money invested in an interest-bearing account. that’s the interest they earn off of MILLIONS. at the very least they should be using this extra money to generate new revenue – which would also help with their long-term financial security – but they can’t even do that

no, they do not need this money to use if they are sued. you can read more about this in the full post, but essentially, they get most of their legal services donated, and they have not, themselves, said this money is for that purpose

i'm not going to go through my process for determining the updated 2024 numbers because i want to get this post out quickly, and otw actually had not updated the sources i needed to get these numbers until the last couple days (seriously, i've been checking), but you can easily recreate the process that @manogirl and i outlined last year with these documents:

otw’s 2022 audited financial statement, to determine how much money they had at the end of 2022

otw’s 2024 budget spreadsheet, to determine their net income in 2023 and how much they transferred to and from reserves at the beginning of 2024

otw’s 2022 form 990 (also available on propublica), which is a tax document, and shows how much interest they earned in 2022 (search “interest” and you’ll find it in several places)  

also, otw has not been accountable to answering questions about their surplus. typically, they hold a public meeting with their finance committee every year in september or october so people can ask questions directly to their treasurer and other committee members; as you can imagine, after doing this deep dive last summer, i was looking forward to getting some answers at that meeting!

but they cancelled that meeting in 2023, and instead asked people to write to the finance committee through their contact us form online. fun fact: i wrote a one-line message to the finance committee on may 11, 2023 through that form, when @manogirl and i were doing this research, asking them for clarification on how much they have in their reserves. i have still not received a response.

so yeah. please spend your money on people who actually need it, like on mutual aid requests! anyone who wants to share their mutual aid requests, please do so in the replies and i’ll share them out – i didn’t want to link directly to individual requests without permission in case this leads to anyone getting harassed, but i would love to share your requests. to start with, here's operation olive branch and their ongoing spreadsheet sharing palestinian folks who need money to escape genocide.

oh, and if you want to write to otw and tell them why you are not donating, i'm not sure it’ll get any results, but it can’t hurt lol. here's their contact us form – just don’t expect a response! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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