urgent 11/14/24

hi im erin, 32, and a lesbian. does anyone have $20 or anything for a family of 7, 4 disabled, two kids under 13, in an abusive situation for food or dinner? pls we need to get through this week. please, anything helps even a dollar or less.

p3ypal: avatarerin

c3sh app: $avatarpyler

v3nmo: skiesofperiwinkle

k0fi: onedollopofsourcream

Hello everyone!!

My name is Lena Khames, a 27-year-old wife to my husband, Mohammed, and a proud mother of three beautiful children: our daughter Yasmmen and our two sons, Ali and Adam.

We come from Al-Zahraa in the Gaza Strip. I have a diploma in e-commerce, but our once stable and hopeful life has been shattered by the devastation of war, leaving us struggling to rebuild.

Our world collapsed when a missile targeted our home, reducing it to rubble in an instant 💔. The home we had built with $40,000, a place where we had hoped to raise our children in peace, was completely destroyed. We have been left homeless, with nothing but memories of what we once had.

Our family has been forced to move repeatedly 💔due to the conflict. After being displaced from our home by military force to a supposedly "safe" area, we quickly learned there is no safe place in Gaza. Each time the danger intensified, we had to flee again, struggling to protect our children from the violence that surrounded us. Today, we live in a tent under unbearable conditions, without even the most basic necessities.

In one of the many attacks, my husband, already suffering from a previous injury, was seriously wounded in his leg 💔. He now requires continuous medical care and a special device to help him walk again. To make matters worse, my husband lost his brother Mahmoud in the conflict—his brother died in his arms while they were inspecting the ruins of our home. The emotional and physical pain has weighed heavily on him, and on all of us.

Adding to our burden, my husband also lost his car—the sole source of income for our family— 💔 which had cost him $20,000. This loss has left us without any means of financial support, making it nearly impossible to care for our children and ensure their safety.

How Your Donation Will Help Us 🙏:

We are seeking to raise €100,000 to help secure a temporary place for our family, as we are currently living in a tent and our children desperately need a safe and stable environment. The funds will also allow us to begin rebuilding our home, which was destroyed, and restore the stability and hope we once had. Additionally, we need urgent financial support for my husband’s medical treatment and travel to find safety and proper care, as we try to escape the ongoing nightmare of war and genocide that we are forced to endure.

👉 Donation Link: https://gofund.me/c17aa129

Please share, like and donate this campaign with your friends, family and colleagues to help us achieve our goals. I would appreciate your assistance. Any amount, even if small, will make a difference in providing assistance to my family in our hour of need.

Thank you for taking the time to read this message and consider making a difference in the lives of those affected by the ongoing crisis in Gaza

With gratitude,

Lina & Her Family

✅Campaign Verification ✅

🔎 Vetted by @gazavetters, on this list (#103)🔎 vetted by @90-ghost here

@a-shade-of-blue here

@brokenbackmountain here

@gaza-evacuation-funds here

✌️ It's Time to Donate!✌️

Despite the number of notes, this GoFundMe is only at € 7000/100,000 right now.

Outlines of two alligators that slept through the rain.

November 12th 1869 saw Edinburgh University first admit women to the study of medicine.

The first two women were Sophia Jex-Blake and her friend Edith Pechy, who, after much hard campaigning on Sophia’s part. They never had it easy, students and other Edinburgh folk were very nuch against them training to be doctors.

Jex-Blake describes the scene here as the two friends went to take their exams……

"On the afternoon of Friday 18th November 1870, we walked to the Surgeon’s Hall, where the anatomy examination was to be held. As soon as we reached the Surgeon’s Hall we saw a dense mob filling up the road… The crowd was sufficient to stop all the traffic for an hour. We walked up to the gates, which remained open until we came within a yard of them, when they were slammed in our faces by a number of young men.”.

A sympathetic student emerged from the hall; he opened the gate and ushered the women inside. They took their examination and passed with flying colours. Although both passed, university regulations only allowed medical degrees to be given to men. The British Medical Association therefore refused to register the women as doctors.

Jex-Blake took herself off to Ireland where she finally obtained her licence to practice from the Dublin College of Physicians. Sophia Jex-Blake then devoted her life to the cause of women in medicine - both improving the treatment of female patients and creating better opportunities for female medical education, eventually founding the revolutionary Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women.

Their strength and decency under pressure went on to inspire many others, right up to the present day. Although Jex-Blake and Petchey were the most famous and seem to get most of the plaudits, There were other women and they are collectively known as The Edinburgh Seven, the others were Mary Anderson, Emily Bovell, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans and Isabel Thorne.

Jex-Blake seems to have been the most successful of the seven, in June 1878 she opened a medical practice at 4 Manor Place; three months later she established a dispensary (an out-patient clinic) for impoverished women at 73 Grove Street, just round the corner from where I used to stay at Upper Grove Place. These ventures were highly successful but after the death of one of her assistants, she suffered from depression. She closed her practice and left the dispensary in the care of her medical colleagues.

She remained inactive for a time before opening Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women in 1887, in its second year the school was disrupted by disputes between Jex-Blake and several of the students who resented her imposition of strict rules of conduct. The school also struggled financially and had to be bailed out by Jex-Blake’s father.

When a rival institution, the Medical College for Women, was opened by Ina Cadell, Grace Cadell, and Elsie Inglis, former students of Jex-Blake, the Edinburgh School of Medicine could no longer compete.The school folded and closed its doors in 1898.

In 1899 Jex-Blake retired but continued to campaign for women’s suffrage until she passed away on 7th January 1912.

The Edinburgh Seven were recognised with posthumous degrees in July this year, the degrees were collected on their behalf by a group of current students at Edinburgh Medical School.The seven’s efforts eventually forced through legislation in 1877 to ensure women could study at university.

The pics show Edith Pechy and Dr Sophia Jex-Blake.

UK accent bias, discrimination, minority languages and the question of the 'default, normal' english speaker

today I came across something overtly that is usually a covert problem, and I wanted to take a chance to talk about the questions it raises about what it means to be 'normal' and speak 'normal english' in an anglocentric, global world.

let's start at the beginning. I was aimlessly googling around and came across this article, discussing ergodic literature:

I hope that you will see what angered me right away, but if not:

brogue? inaccessible, insufferable brogue? that is so difficult to read you might want to relieve your frustrations by harming a housepet, or striking a loved one?

what????? the fuck??????

my dearly beloathed. this is not a made up sci-fi language. this was not written for your convenience.

this is the glaswegian dialect.

this is how it is written. scots, which is very similar to this, is a language whose speakers have been systematically taught to change and hide and modify their speech, to not speak it in the classroom, to conform. this is NOT comparable to any of the made-up dialects or ways of writing in cloud atlas or any other specularative fiction. the suggestion of ir is deeply insulting.

(the line between various 'dialects' and 'languages' I speak about here is by definition sometimes political, sometimes arbitrary, and often very thin. what goes for the glaswegian dialect here in terms of discrimination goes for scots in general - which is, in fact, even more 'inaccessible' than glaswegian because it has a greater quantity of non-english and therefore non-'familiar' words. speakers of different englishes will face more or less discrimination in different circumstances. caveat over.)

you can find it on twitter, in books, in poetry; and more than that, on the streets and in living rooms, in places that this kind of england-first discrimination hasn't totally eradicated.

an imporant note - this book in question is called Naw Much of a Talker, and it was written originally in Swiss-German and then translated into Glaswegian to preserve similar themes and questions of language and identity. rather than detracting from anything I'm saying, I think the fact this is a translated piece of fiction adds to it - it has literally been translated so it is more accessible, and the article writer did not even realise. it also highlights the fact as well that these are questions which exist across the globe, across multiple languages, of the constant tension everywhere between the 'correct' high language and the 'incorrect, backward' 'low' language or dialect. these are all interesting questions, and someone else can tackle them about german and swiss german -

but I am going to talk today about scots and english, because that is how the writer of this article engaged with this piece and that is the basis upon which they called it 'insufferable brogue', the prejudice they have revealed about scots is what I want to address.

so here, today, in this post: let's talk about it. what is 'normal' english, why is that a political question, and why should we care?

as we begin, so we're all on the same page, I would like to remind everyone that england is not the only country in the united kingdom, and that the native languages of the united kingdom do not only include english, but also:

there are also countless rich, beautiful dialects (the distinction between dialect and language is entirely political, so take this description with a pinch of salt if you're outside of these speaker communities), all with their own words and histories and all of them, yes all of them, are deserving of respect.

and there are hundreds and thousands of common immigrant languages, of languages from the empire, and of englishes across the globe that might sound 'funny' to you, but I want you to fucking think before you mock the man from the call centre: why does india speak english in the first place? before mocking him, think about that.

because it's political. it's ALL political. it's historical, and it's rooted in empire and colonialism and all you need to do is take one look at how we talk about Black language or languages of a colonised country to see that, AAVE or in the UK, multi-cultural london english, or further afield - the englishes of jamaica, kenya, india. all vestiges of empire, and all marked and prejudiced against as 'unintelligent' or lesser in some way.

and closer to home - the systematic eradication and 'englishification' of the celtic languages. how many people scottish gaelic now? cornish? manx? how many people speak welsh? and even within 'english' itself - how many people from a country or rural or very urban or immigrant or working class or queer background are discriminated against, because of their english? why do you think that is?

if you think that language isn't political, then you have likely never encountered discrimination based on how you, your friends, or your family speak.

you are speaking from a position of privilege.

'but it's not formal' 'but it's not fit for the classroom' 'but it sounds silly'. you sound silly, amy. I have a stereotypically 'posh' english accent, and I can tell you for a fact: when I go to scotland to visit my family, they think I sound silly too. but in the same way as 'reverse racism' isn't a fucking thing - the difference is that it's not systemic. when I wanted to learn gaelic, my grandmother - who speaks gaelic as her own native language - told me, no, you shouldn't do that. you're an english girl. why would you want to learn a backward language like gaelic?

discrimination against non-'english' englishes is pervasive, systematic and insidious.

it is not the same as being laughed at for being 'posh'. (there's more about class and in-group sociolinguistics here, but that's for another post)

and who told you this? where is this information from? why do you think an 'essex girl' accent sounds uneducated? why do you think a northern accent sound 'honest' and 'salt of the earth'? what relationship does that have with class? why does a standard southern british english sound educated and 'intelligent'? who is in charge? who speaks on your television? whose words and accents do you hear again and again, making your policies, shaping your future? who speaks over you?

think about that, please.

and before anyone says: this is so true except for X lol - I am talking about exactly that dialect. I am talking about that accent you are mocking. I am talking about brummie english, which you think sounds funny. I'm talking about old men in the west country who you think sound like pirates, arrrrr.

(actually, pirates sound like the west country. where do you the 'pirate accent' came from? devon was the heart of smuggling country in the uk.)

so. to this person who equated a book written in scots, a minority and marginalised language, to being 'insufferable, inaccessible brogue':

and also to anyone who is from the UK, anyone who is a native english speaker, and anyone abroad, but especially those of you who think your english is 'natural', who have never had to think about it, who have never had to code-switch, who have never had to change how they sound to fit in:

it might be difficult to read - for you. it might be strange and othering - to you.

but what is 'inaccessible' to you is the way that my family speaks - your english might be 'inaccessible' to them. so why does your 'inaccessible' seem to weigh more than theirs?

and why does it bother you, that you can't understand it easily in the first go? because you have to try? or because perhaps, just perhaps, dearly beloathed author of this article, after being catered to your entire life and shown your language on screen, constantly - you are finally confronted by something that isn't written for you.

and for the non-uk people reading this. I would like you to think very carefully about what a 'british accent' means to you.

there is no such thing. let me say it louder:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BRITISH ACCENT

there are a collection of accents and languages and dialects, each with different associations and stereotypes. the clever aristocrat, the honest farmer, the deceitful *racial slur*. there are accents, languages and dialects that you hear more than others because of political reasons, and there are accents, languages and dialects which are more common than others because of discrimination, violence and the path of history.

if you say 'british accent', we - in the UK - don't know exactly what you mean. much more than the US, because the english-speaking people have been here longer, we have incredibly different accents just fifty miles away from one another.

but we can guess. you probably don't mean my grandmother's second-language english - even though, by american conversations about race, she is the whitest person you could possibly find. you don't mean my brother, who sounds like a farmer.

you mean my accent. tom hiddleston's accent. benedict cumberbatch. dame judy dench. sir ian mckellen. and they are all wonderful people - but what sort of people are they, exactly? what sort of things do they have in common? why is it that you associate their way of speaking with all of the charming eloquence of 'dark academia' or high levels of education, and my family's english with being 'backward' or 'country bumpkins' or 'uneducated' or, more insidiously, 'salt-of-the-earth good honest folk'?

we are an old country with old prejudices and old classes and old oppression and old discrimination and old hate. my brother speaks with a 'farmer' west country accent; my aunt with a strong doric accent that most english people cannot understand; my father with a mockable birmingham accent; my grandmother with a gaelic accent, because despite the fact that she is from the UK, as scottish as you can get, english is not her first language.

these people exist. my grandmother is a real person, and she is not a dying relic of a forgotten time. her gaelic is not something to drool over in your outlander or braveheart or brave-fuelled scottish romanticism, the purity and goodness of the 'celt' - but there are fewer people like her now. and I would like to invite everyone to think about why that is the case.

if you don't know, you can educate yourself - look up the highland clearances, for a start, or look at the lives of anglo-romani speakers in the UK and the discrimination they face, or irish speakers in northern ireland. like many places, we are a country that has turned inward upon itself. there will always be an 'other'.

and then there's me. raised in southern england and well-educated and, however you want to call it, 'posh'. so why is it that it is my voice, and not theirs, which is considered typically british all over the world?

I think you can probably figure out that one by yourself.

when you talk about the 'british accent', this is doing one of two things. it's serving to perpetuate the myth that the only part of the UK is england, rather than four countries, and the harmful idea that it is only england in the UK that matters. (and only a certain type of people in england, at that.)

secondly, it serves to amalgamate all of the languages and accents and dialects - native or poor or immigrant or colonial - into one, erasing not only their history and importance, but even their very existence.

dearly beloathed person on the internet. I have no idea who you are. but the language scots exists. I'm sorry it's not convenient for you.

but before I go, I would like to take a moment to marvel. 'insufferable, inaccessible brogue'? what assumptions there are, behind your words!

is it 'insufferable' to want to write a story in the language you were raised in? is it 'inaccessible' to want to write a story in the shared language of your own community?

I don't think it is.

I think it takes a special sort of privilege and entitlement to assume that - the same one that assumes whiteness and Americanness and Englishness and able-bodiedness and cisness and maleness and straightness as being the 'standard' human experience, and every single other trait as being a deviance from that, an othering. that's the same entitlement that will describe Turning Red as a story about the chinese experience - but not talk about how Toy Story is a story about the white american middle class experience.

people do not exist for your ease of reading. they do not exist to be 'accessible'. and - what a strange thing, english reader, to assume all books are written for you, at all.

and despite the fact that the text that prompted this was written by one group of white people, translated into the language of another group, and critiqued by a third - this is a conversation about racism too, because it is the same sort of thinking and pervasive stereotyping which goes into how white people and spaces view Black language and language of people of colour around the world. it's about colonialism and it's about slavery and it's aboutsegregation and othering and the immigrant experience and it's about the history of britain - and my god, isn't that a violent one. it's inseparable from it. language is a tool to signify belonging, to shut people out and lock people in. it's a tool used to enforce that othering and discrimination and hate on a systemic level, because it says - I'm different from you. you're different from me. this post is focusing more on the native languages of the UK, but any question of 'correct language' must inevitably talk about racism too, because language is and has always been a signifier of group belonging, and a way to enforce power.

it is used to gatekeep, to enforce conformity, to control, to signify belonging to a particular group, to other. talking about language 'correctness' is NOT and never CAN be a neutral thing.

it reminds me of a quote, and I heard this second hand on twitter and for the life of me cannot remember who said it or exactly how it goes, but the gist of it was a queer writer addressing comments saying how 'universal' their book was, and saying - no, this is a queer book. if you want to find themes and moments in it that are applicable to your 'default' life, 'universals' of emotion and experience, go ahead. but I have had to translate things from the norm my entire life, to make them relatable for me. this time, you do the translation.

I do not speak or write scots or glaswegian, but I grew up reading it and listening to it (as well as doric and gaelic in smaller measures, which are still familiar to me but which I can understand less). for me, that passage is almost as easy to read as english - and the only reason it is slightly more difficult is because, predictably, I don't have a chance to practice reading scots very often at all. it isn't inaccessible to me.

(I was about to write: can you imagine looking at a book written in french, and scowling, saying, 'this is so insufferably foreign!' and then point out how ridiculous that would be. but then I realise - foreign film, cinema, lyrics increasingly in english, reluctance to read the subtitles, the footnotes, to look things up, to engage in any active way in any piece of media. this is an attitude which even in its most mockable, most caricature-like form, is extremely prevalent online. *deep sigh*)

because. what is 'inaccessible'? it means it is difficult for people who are 'normal'. and what is 'normal', exactly? why is a certain class of people the 'default'? could that be, perhaps, a question with very loaded and very extensive political, social and historical answers? who is making the judgement about what language is 'normal'? who gets to decide?

I'd also like to note that this applies to everyone. it doesn't matter if you are a member of an oppressed group, or five, or none, you can still engage in this kind of discrimination and stereotyping. my scottish family, who have themselves had to change the way they speak and many of them lost their gaelic because of it, routinely mock anglo-romani speakers in their local area. I have an indian friend, herself speaking english because of a history of violence and colonialism, who laughed for five minutes at the beginning of derry girls because the girls sounded so 'funny', and asked me: why did they choose to speak like that? my brother, who sounds very stereotypically rural and 'uneducated', laughs at the essex accent and says that he would never date a girl from essex. I had a classmate from wales who was passionate about welsh language rights and indigenous and minority language education but also made fun of the accent of her native-english speaking classmate from singapore. it goes on and on and on.

take the dialect/language question out of the topic, and I think this reveals a much broader problem with a lot of conversations about media, and the implicit assumptions of what being 'normal' [read: white, anglo-centric, american, male, straight, young, able-bodied, cis, etc] actually means:

if something is written about an experience I do not share, is it inaccessible? or is it just written for someone else?

so, please. next time you want to write a review about a dialect or language you don't speak, think a little before you open your mouth.

the rest of the world has to, every time.

Very weel pit ma freend. Especially the code switching pairt. A' can relate tae that allot.

I've been looking into some of my reading materials and figuring out if my Lowland ancestors had their own set of cosmological beliefs.

From what I've learned, it turns out they did.

Like the Gaels they acknowledged three worlds, except they did not associate them with the land, sea and sky.

Instead they saw the world existing in three places:

In amongst the three worlds exists Elfame and Purgatory. Elfame in academic terms is known as 'Fairy Land' and it is where the Fair Folk dwell. Purgatory is another known realm and comes from the pre Reformation (Catholic) tradition. The two places are associated with the dead and it's said that people go to Elfame (or Purgatory) when they die.

The concept of boundaries is another interesting concept. Scots folk saw the outer known reaches of their communities as being places of danger whilst the 'toun' or community is the safe and pure space. Between the 'pure' and 'danger' spaces is the 'threshold' where encounters with the Fair Folk (Elves in Scots) were said to happen.

The inside - Safe. The outside - Danger.

Lastly, features of the cosmos such as the sun, moon, stars, planets, ghosts/fairies were unseen forces that could be harmful or beneficial to mortals depending on the circumstances. Liminal spaces and times also had supernatural features associated with them.

This is what I've found so far in terms of cosmology existing with in the Scots speaking culture. I would go into more detail but I feel it would be too long of an article to write. Obviously If I find more info then I might consider righting a proper account on Lowland Cosmology.

In the mean time, I will be doing more research on the subject and hope to gather more information on it.

Sources

To the smudgies, Instagram witches and witches of Witchtok. May I remind you that Saining is not a smoke cleansing ritual. It has nothing to do with cleansing or getting rid of' bad energies' or bringing in 'positive vibez'.

Saining is a set of rites intended to bless, consecrate and protect people, individuals, animals and objects from supernatural harm. It comes from my country (Scotland) and has no relation to contemporary witchcraft. The purpose of Saining is to get rid of harmful influences like witchcraft and the evil eye, and also to bring blessings to community members who take part in the tradition.

Stop calling your smoke cleansing rituals Saining. It's not Saining if you are doing it for 'likes and subscribes' or for aesthetic reasons.

Oh, and lastly it's not Smudging. Don't even think about comparing it to Smudging. Smudging comes from First Nations people of Turtle Island (USA) and has nothing to do with Saining.

Hello every one👇

I am Widad Alsbakhi from Palestine, Gaza Strip, married with 5 children, living in Gaza and currently living with my children in a very small displacement tent, after our beautiful home was destroyed by the damned war. We are currently living in very difficult conditions, seeing death before our eyes every day and every moment, as every day represents a new challenge to survive, as my children lack safety and the most important basics of life such as good food, clean water and clothes that protect them from the bitter cold, I hope you will help me and stand by me to save my children, as I and my children are in a state of fear and panic from what we are living now. Your sympathy and mercy for my situation will give me and my children the opportunity and hope to live again after we lost everything in life, and I am certain that you understand the magnitude of the tragedy we are living. I ask you to contribute to saving us. We are in dire need of your support and standing by us, to be part of the hope in this darkness that surrounds us. Please allow me to have this opportunity, and you will be the reason for making a real difference in my children's smiles.

@ibtisam @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @fairuzfakhira @fallahsart @sayruq @humanvoreture @kaapstadgirly @sar-soor @dimonds456-art @plomegranate @commissions4aid-international @nabulsi27 @stil-macher @soon-palestine @communitythings @palestinegenocide @kaapstadgirly @annoyingloudmicrowavecultist @feluka-blog-blog @marnotrawstw-o @toughknit @flower-tea-fairies @the-stray-liger @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @vivisection-gf @communistchameleon @troythecatfish @the-bastard-king @4ft10tvlandfangirl

Gonna be fr grown adult queers should know better than to engage in crazy fear mongering telling other people it’s over and we’re all gonna be sent to camps and lose our rights and be criminalized and whatever like hey how about don’t tell a group of people with unbelievably high suicide rates that there’s no hope and life is over

‏Hello 👋🏻 my friends . I am Mohammed from Gaza 🇵🇸❤️, I earnestly request your support for me and my family in Gaza 🙏🏻💝. This fundraising campaign stands as our last hope to rebuild, restore, and shape a future filled with hope and freedom 🫂, our lifeline amidst the depths of despair, with great sadness😢💔, I beg for your as we endure this unimaginable ordeal, with your help we can survive, without your help we can die, and for that, we are eternally grateful, please help us because there is no guarantee of survival here 🙏🏻😭. A minute of your time and reading my story can save us from death, please donate if you can, and share if you can’t 💓🫂.

‏✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #254 )✅️.

this “bon appetit” meme has turned into some sort of bizarre telephone game where each incarnation sounds more and more different than the original. in what way does “bon appetit” sound like “osteoporosis”

i don’t know but it’s cracking me up every time i even think about it

bon appetit -> bone apple teeth -> bone ??? ??? -> osteoporosis

this has layers, man

Blood Pythons (Python brongersmai), family Pythonidae, found in SE Asia

photographs by Dick Bartlett