The War Has Finally Ended After 471 Days Of Pain, Death, And Suffering, Where Each Day Carried A Weight

(This campaign has been vetted by @moayesh, who has asked me to post this fundraiser. Mohamed is personally vetting many campaigns for people trapped in Gaza, which you can also find at @gaza-evacuation-funds)

As you can read above, the Al-Habil family are in desperate need of our help. They have only raised €255 as of my writing this. They are setting an initial short-term goal of €1,000 which will enable them to purchase a much needed new tent and food.

I encourage you to read more about Shadiah and her family and what they are facing on their gofundme page linked below. Please, please consider donating even just €5, as your contribution will make a material difference in this family's life. They have been suffering immensely, and we are able to relieve some of this suffering through our collective efforts. Let's work together to help them!

€255/€1,000

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Gazans family get to safety and survive, organized by raed Alhabil

‏,Hello to the world, with you Shadia Al-habil's family , If you are a perso… raed Alhabil needs your support for Help Gazans family get to

tagging for reach, my apologies! please lmk if you don't wish to be tagged going forward <3

@appsa @brutaliakhoa @watermotif @dirhwangdaseul @shesnake @akajustmerry @stuckinapril @heritageposts @northgazaupdates2 @deathlonging @furiousfinnstan @lakevida @womenintheirwebs @7bitter @rhubarbspring @poetrylesbian @schoolhater @transmutationisms @opencommunion

A Heartfelt Plea: Help Me Return Home🕊️

Dear friends, In the past few days, I've been grappling with the trauma of the situation and trying to figure out what comes next after the ceasefire. After everything we've endured, I am finally able to return to the north of Gaza, where our homes once stood, now reduced to rubble. I’m reaching out to you because I need help. The cost of transporting my family and our belongings is extremely high, and unfortunately, we can't afford it on our own. There are no tents in the north, and buying new ones there isn’t an option. I can’t leave our things behind; they are all we have left.

My heart is tied to that place, to the sky above our home, even if it’s uninhabitable. I miss it so deeply, and I need to be there with my loved ones, surrounded by what’s left of our life. I trust you, my friends, and I consider you my family. Please, if you can, help us cover the transportation costs. Every little bit counts, and your support would mean the world to us during this difficult time. If you can’t donate, sharing this with others who might be able to help would also make a huge difference. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. With love, 🌸

🌟 Our campaign is vetted by 🇵🇸 @/gazavetters List at #291

gofundme.com

Donate to Help my family rise from the ashes, organised by Tahir Awad

Hello Everyone, I am Nour Al Madhoun, 30 years old, a computer engineer from gaza, my h… Tahir Awad needs your support for Help my family r

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

I want you to remember:

The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.

i saw a video the other day detailing why we see so much about gaza🇵🇸 but not sudan🇸🇩

it comes down to these 3 key differences

while gaza is much bloodier, gaza has journalists reporting daily. as a journalist you will be targeted viciously but it's a delayed risk because the enemy isn't on ground. your enemies are cowards who plot and kill you from afar.

in sudan it's impossible to report anything because the enemy is walking down your street (if not in your house) like rabid dogs. you will be shot on sight. it's an immediate risk. there is no time to capture or comment on anything. whatever information you put out will be your first and last.

in sudan, the updates come from the warring factions filming themselves, not from civilians. and you can imagine the bias and inaccuracy of their egotistical daily vlogs and official statements.

which is why it's more imperative than ever to follow Sudanese creators and journalists who do report on the little information that does come out.

here's a post on where to get daily updates about Sudan

disclaimer: palestinian press also deal with immediate risks when confronted with IDF on-ground.

Would be a shame if people would call their representatives even more

Like I know it’s not a lot, but even if your representative won’t listen to you at least you can annoy them and what’s more American than that?

‼️Helping me means helping 5 members of my family..‼️

🥶We're freezing🥶

Hello, I'm Wasim from Gaza, in Al-Mawasi specifically... My family and I were displaced from Rafah after hardship, bombing, displacement, and hunger.😭😔

Now we have been away from our city and our beautiful home for 9 months. We have lost our house that my father built stone by stone and he worked 24/7 to build this house. But the occupation destroyed it, and no house remained in my beautiful city remained intact.😭💔💔

We are now living in a tent or semi-tent, which does not protect us from the cold of winter or the rain. Our lives are very difficult.😔😭

Thanks to your donations, we have been able to buy food and flour, and now I am asking you for help to buy a tent that will protect us from the cold of winter. We do not know what it means to sleep because of the extreme cold.🥶

This is our tent made of fabric and some nylon, not closed on one side. We are freezing from the cold. Help us to buy a new tent. You are our last hope.😭🥶🥶🙏

I also want to ask for help for my mother, who is the most precious thing in my life. Without her, I am nothing...

She has a back cartilage disease and is in great pain. She needs physical therapy, medicine, and vitamins, and I am unable to provide them. Help my mother receive treatment.🙏🙏😭

Campaign Link⬇️⬇️⬇️

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Wasim's family rebuild their lives, organized by Freya Knarr

My name is Freya Knarr and I live near Chicago, IL. Because Gofundme does not allo… Freya Knarr needs your support for Help Wasim's family r

@gazavetters

Reposting @chasestrangio:

I am reminding myself that my resistance will come through denying the administration the chaos they seek. It will come by remembering that their plans and rhetoric are just the regurgitated policies that we have long defied. It will come through our insistent and urgent love for each other. We have the collective memory and mapmaking to guide us. That does not mean it won’t be scary. It will. It just means we will turn our fear towards care not chaos. Towards building not dividing. Thank you to everyone holding me. I will hold you too. I put my faith in us.

Israel has violated Phase 2 of the ceasefire agreement and has blocked humanitarian aid from entering Gaza once again during Ramadan. Prices for food and other necessities have skyrocketed. In addition to this, the solar panels that produce the energy that allows Gazans to connect to the internet are still in need of repair.

Simply put: there is a lot for us to do right now. 

Please donate and share to the Al-Anqars fundraiser, which supports the lives of 14 people, as well as their community in North Gaza. While the Rafah border crossing is still closed, it is IMPERATIVE that we continue raising funds so that once it opens, the family can cross as quickly as possible.

€14,210/€20,000 – DONATE AND SHARE

gofundme.com

Donate to Rising from the Ashes: Ghada’s Journey of Hope and Resilien, organized by ghada alanqar

A Cry from the Rubble: A Family Torn Apart by War … ghada alanqar needs your support for Rising from the Ashes: Ghada’s Journey o