thatdiva

[thatdiva]

“My Grandfather speaks rapid Cantonese to me. He’s telling me what he wants from McDonalds. The kid behind the counter rolls his eyes at this. The woman behind us in line says “Speak English” under her breathe. The grip my Grandfather has on my arm tightens. My Grandfather can speak English. He can understand English. He can write English. But he came when he was in his twenties, and he has an accent that will never leave. And when he speaks English he hears- “How long have you been here?” “Can you repeat that again?” “I don’t understand you.” And it humiliates him. This man who left his family, who left his life to make a better one. The bravest man I know is embarrassed of his accent. And in McDonalds, the man who crossed the pacific in a freight boat with no papers and no one he knew in this country, bows his head in shame.”

— Gwai Lo (via tat-art)

[thatdiva]

[thatdiva]

“I’m far away but I’m praying for you. And I’m sending peace, on an olive branch. In the land of peace, peace is dead. And the world is sleeping on a hurt child.”

—Palestinian artist, Elyanna

[thatdiva]

In this video from 2015, Democracy Now! covers Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge.”

“The Israeli veterans group, Breaking the Silence, released testimonies of more than 60 Israeli officers and soldiers which it says illustrate a “broad ethical failure” that “comes from the top of the chain of command.” More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the assault, the vast majority civilians. On Israel’s side, 73 people were killed, all but six of them soldiers. During the 50-day operation, more than 20,000 Palestinian homes were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced. We hear candid video testimonies from the soldiers and speak to former Israeli paratrooper Avner Gvaryahu, director of public outreach at Breaking the Silence.”

Please listen to the soldiers who participated in this routine “lawn mowing” operation, as they testify about a fraction of the war crimes that were casually committed by the Israel army against Palestinian noncombatants. These admissions show a persistent state of mind, and that Israel has always intentionally and indiscriminately targeted civilians, and proves that the IDF is knowingly committing war crimes against the residents of Gaza.

This did not begin on October 7th. 🇵🇸

Full video here.

[thatdiva]

How To Keep Black People Alive, a visual essay by Charlotte Gomez and Hannah Giorgis

[thatdiva]

"At least 27 children have died because of dehydration and malnutrition in the Northern Gaza Strip. These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable." -UNRWA

[thatdiva]

“It’s Russia who attacked Ukraine!”

“We are against the war!”

Chechen Muslims are used as cannon fodder in Putin’s war on Ukraine (source)

[thatdiva]

modern social media should stop offering "sync with your phone contacts to follow them" options and start offering "block all your phone contacts so they never see your account" options

[thatdiva]

As of April 23rd, 2024:

People killed in the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip: 42,510

Civilians: 38,621

Women: 10,091

Children: 15,780

Percentage of children and women killed: 60%

Percentage of civilians killed: 91%

(source)

[thatdiva]

[thatdiva]

It's the gigantic elephant in the room.

[thatdiva]

The responsibility of the poet? My medical mentor, a Jewish man from Waco, Texas, used to say that a plethora of ongoing research on a particular medical subject indicates that we still don’t know enough about that subject. And that’s how I feel about the responsibility of the poet. We keep talking about it because it is relentlessly mutable, pluripotent. We are never satisfied with our answers. I often think that the responsibility of the poet is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human: an ever-changing constant. In poetry, the range of metaphors and topics is limited, predictable, but the styles are innumerable. Think how we read poetry from centuries ago and are no longer bothered by its outdated diction. All that remains of old poetry is the music of what it means to be human. And perhaps that’s all we want from poetry. A language of life. I like this quote by J. M. Coetzee: “The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.”

Fady Joudah, from his interview with Aria Aber: "Fady Joudah | The poet on how the war in Gaza changed his work", published in The Yale Review, February 28, 2024

[thatdiva]

Reaching for an example of her unflinching preparedness to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it needs to be done, Kristi Noem landed on a chilling example: the time she killed her pet dog, Cricket, in an execution-style gravel pit slaying.

The South Dakota governor, whose unbreakable devotion to Donald Trump has propelled her to somewhere near the top of his list of his potential 2024 running mates, reportedly included her disturbing tale of canicide in a book set to be published next month. “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem writes, according to The Guardian, which obtained a copy.

According to the newspaper, Noem recounts the story of how she not only killed Cricket—a female “wirehair pointer, about 14 months old”—but then also proceeded to botch the killing of an unnamed goat that she owned to which she had taken a disliking.

(source)

“I hated that dog,” Noem reportedly writes, adding that Cricket was simply “untrainable” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.” It was then that she realized “I had to put her down,” she adds.

Noem explains that she grabbed her gun and took Cricket to a gravel pit. “It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “But it had to be done.” Afterward, she writes, she decided she also needed to kill a male goat she owned that was “nasty and mean” because it was uncastrated, complaining that the buck “loved to chase” Noem’s children around and would wreck their clothes by knocking them down.

She reportedly writes of the goat that she “dragged him to a gravel pit” like Cricket, but the killing did not go as smoothly. The goat jumped when she pulled the trigger, Noem says, meaning the goat survived the shot. She adds that she went to her truck to get another shell and then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”

Noem says that a construction crew had seen her killing both the dog and the goat. She also writes that when her daughter, Kennedy, came home from school, she “looked around confused” and asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”

(continue reading)

#kristi noem #dog killer #animal abuse

[thatdiva]

S 🇵🇸 O 🇵🇸 L 🇵🇸 I 🇵🇸 D 🇵🇸 A 🇵🇸 R 🇵🇸 I 🇵🇸 T 🇵🇸 Y 🇵🇸

[thatdiva]

[thatdiva]

Reneé Rapp wins 'Outstanding Music Artist' 35th Annual GLAAD Media Awards (March 14, 2024)

[thatdiva]

btw! I was made aware that many people don't know that we're boycotting Eurovision this year, so.

we are boycotting Eurovision, as per BDS guidelines.

don't watch the stream, don't engage with the videos, don't post it about it on social media using hashtags that are going to trend.