I Used To Hate It When People Said The Trick Was To Just Do It Until ‘do It Scared’ Started Going

As a leftist Jew who believes strongly in the cause of dignity and freedom for the Palestinian people, and that Israel has abused them, I am begging fellow leftists to understand that real life is not a comic book. A government being “the bad guy” in a situation does not automatically make anyone who opposes it “the good guy”.

Hamas denies the Holocaust. Hamas disseminates the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the conspiracy theory it paints is what they mean by “Zionist”. Hamas forbids foreign aid educators from teaching human rights to Palestinians, and claims that even teaching that the Holocaust happened is a war crime. Hamas has written the aim of annihilating Israel (the country and its people) into its charter—the mass slaughter and violent expulsion of 7 million Jews from the land is written into its laws.

There is no crime any state could ever do that would justify any of that; there is no act of state repression that could ever make it acceptable to side with the organization spreading Nazi pamphlets and Holocaust denial.

Oppose Bibi Netanyahu. Oppose Israel’s far-right, authoritarian government. Oppose Likud’s policies. Oppose its violence against Palestinian civilians. That isn’t antisemitic. But Hamas is—verifiably, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to its core—antisemitic. Its portrayal of Israeli Jews as blood-thirsty, child-killing master manipulators that control international media and finance is antisemitic. Its insistence that Palestinian freedom necessitates the death & expulsion of Jews from the land is antisemitic. Its redefinition of “Zionism” as a pejorative to mean genocidal Jewish/Israeli Supremacy is antisemitic.

Supporting the Palestinian people in their plight is a noble and loving goal; please never stop that. But do not let Hamas co-opt that into excusing or denying their rampant antisemitism and war crimes.

“In a 1994 Harvard study that examined people who had radically changed their lives, for instance, researchers found that some people had remade their habits after a personal tragedy, such as a divorce or a life-threatening illness. Others changed after they saw a friend go through something awful, the same way that Dungy’s players watched him struggle.

Just as frequently, however, there was no tragedy that preceded people’s transformations. Rather, they changed because they were embedded in social groups that made change easier. One woman said her entire life shifted when she signed up for a psychology class and met a wonderful group. “It opened a Pandora’s box,” the woman told researchers. “I could not tolerate the status quo any longer. I had changed in my core.” Another man said that he found new friends among whom he could practice being gregarious. “When I do make the effort to overcome my shyness, I feel that it is not really me acting, that it’s someone else,” he said. But by practicing with his new group, it stopped feeling like acting. He started to believe he wasn’t shy, and then, eventually, he wasn’t anymore. When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real. For most people who overhaul their lives, there are no seminal moments or life-altering disasters. There are simply communities⏤sometimes of just one other person⏤who make change believable.

One woman told researchers her life transformed after a day spent cleaning toilets⏤and after weeks of discussing with the rest of the cleaning crew whether she should leave her husband.

“Change occurs among other people,” one of the psychologists involved in the study, Todd Heatherton, told me. “It seems real when we can see it in other people’s eyes.”

The precise mechanisms of belief are little understood. No one is certain why a group encountered in a psychology class can convince a woman that everything is different, or why Dungy’s team came together after their coach’s son passed away. Plenty of people talk to friends about unhappy marriages and never leave their spouse; lots of teams watch their coaches experience adversity and never gel. 

But we do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible. The same process that makes AA so effective⏤the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe⏤happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.”

⏤ The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg

Rafif, my 11-year-old sister, deprived of her childhood, miraculously survived the targeting of our displacement site, along with the rest of my family. Death follows us everywhere. We're in Rafah, bewildered about how to escape this nightmare. Rafif sustained a minor injury to her foot, and she's scared, wondering how we can evade death. Please help me get Rafif and my family out of harm's way. Help us achieve the basic necessities of life, including childhood for this girl. Share the link or contribute, even if it's just a little, to be the reason for our rescue.

Help Helles family

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Donate to Help me and my family to evacuate Gaza .., organized by Nael Hilles

Hello everyone its me Nael Hilles im 26 years old from Palestine Gaza and now we… Nael Hilles needs your support for Help me and my family t

I love how dorky the nomai are. They're this ancient, stupidly advanced civilisation so you'd expect them to be all high and mighty, yet you get lines like:

"Also I very much wanted to make a model"

"Hypothesis: there can exist too much lava"

"Science compels us to explode the sun"

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Help Muhammed and his family evacuate to safety, organized by Matilde Cunha

I'm Matilde Cunha and I'm a veterinary medicine student from Portugal. … Matilde Cunha needs your support for Help Muhammed and his family

Please help Mohamed evacuate his family out of Gaza to safety! Share his gofundme and donate if you can!!

you have no idea how much it pains me that I can't watch goncharov. I want to watch this movie so bad it makes me look stupid.

Americans really really need to be less paranoid and more capable of tolerating minor discomfort in public. Not everyone is a pervert/rapist/strangler/fiend. In fact, very few people are. Treating every violation of normal order as though it is a threat is why people are getting shot for turning around in a stranger's driveway. This happens within the frameworks of basically every ideology present in American culture. It is an American illness. If your vision of the world doesn't have room for saying "I'm sure it's nothing" then you really gotta work some shit out.