As a rule of thumb, don't reblog donation posts or people asking for donations unless they've been vetted and reblogged by Palestinian bloggers. We usually go to lengths to verify this shit because we know scammers have been faking to get people to send them money, using the urgency of our genocide as bait.

It's disgusting this is what we're dealing with, but people are losing money because of some truly evil people out there.

Accounts don't just randomly spring up on tumblr without gofundmes while asking for someone to help them create a campaign. Fuck out of here with that shit.

I'm also gonna stop listing the reasons why I recognize something is a scam. It's becoming more and more clear there is 1 person behind this STRING of scams and they're leaving less trails behind but it still reeks of them and their MO.

DO NOT TRUST ANY GOFUNDME OR REQUEST FOR CROWDFUNDING THAT PALESTINIAN BLOGGERS HAVEN'T VERIFIED.

At this point I'm fine receiving a bunch of inbox messages asking me to vet x y z so y'all can avoid this shit. But please have some critical thinking!

People are exploiting our situation.

Reblog this post.

Whether you wanna read the whole thing or not idc.

REBLOG IT.

The person this was about deleted the 4th or 5th scam account they made and are definitely gonna make a new one soon. I don't want anybody falling for this anymore.

OP's masterlist of vetted requests

every little bit helps.

Once again, end your NYT subscription

"free palestine," he shouted until his last breath.

aaron bushnell, we will never forget you.

"B-but Palestinians can get their freedom with peace not violence 🥺🥺" no. Screw your feelings. The armed resistance against colonizers and murderers is what will give Palestinians their freedom and what will eventually achieve real peace.

An enemy that bombs and uses white phosphorus against civilians doesn't know nor practice what your broken moral compass describes as "peace". Freedom was proven throughout history not to be achieved through kneeling and asking the oppressor to kindly stop. Freedom needs to be taken by force. Your little Utopian way of thinking doesn't work in the real world. Your feelings don't matter because you're not the one living under occupation. Your feelings don't matter because you're not one of the thousands of children who lost their limbs. You're not one of the children who became orphans due to this genocide. You're not the mother who lost her child to the carpet bombing. You're not the father carrying the remains of your child in plastic bags. You're not the newlywed woman who lost her husband. You're not the one at risk of either getting killed any second or losing your loved ones in the blink of an eye!

"Peace" is not really a thing you see during a live ethnic cleansing!

Reblogging this as a fuck you to the previous person who opposed the resistance.

Peace will never liberate oppression. It just won't, and if you think it will, you're too ignorant of history to be involved in this conversation.

Not once has "please stop oppressing us" made an oppressor go "aw, shit, my bad, sorry bro". Oppressors want power. They don't want equality. If someone is willing to murder in order to prevent you from having equality, they won't care if you ask from that equality "peacefully". They'll take it as an opportunity to murder you and make an example of you to make everyone else fear the same fate, thus allowing the oppressor to keep their power.

Equal rights are taken, not given. Peace was never an option, and that was decided the day Israel first began displacing, oppressing, and terrorizing Palestine when they took over and colonized the country for their own Zionist views.

Some relevant movies and tv shows that should be boycotted:

If you support Palestine, boycott zionist companies and stop funding them. Besides, there are many ways to watch the newest movies without paying a cent.

Please feel free to add more movies and shows with source links! 🍉

In addition, here are some other useful links:

🇵🇸 From BDS:

In anticipation of the upcoming Israeli Apartheid Week, BDS has called for an escalation of our boycott campaigns.

To find out how you can join a specific BDS campaign, or how you can contribute towards IAW, you can use the search function on their website to find a BDS-affiliated organization in your country.

If you and your organization have an event planned for Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), you can register them with BDS here.

🇵🇸 For individuals unaffiliated with an org, you can still support and participate in IAW by:

I highly encourage you to join a BDS-affiliated org, but if for whatever reason you can't, then these are concrete and actionable steps you can take.

Again, for more information about BDS and Israeli Apartheid Week, you check in with the official BDS website.

Over 100 journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7th.

the fact that Israel can precisely target ONE apartment in an entire residential block in BEIRUT to kill two hamas leaders, proves once again that they CHOSE to carpet-bomb Gaza and murder 31.000 Palestinians to "defend themselves" against Hamas. Israel CHOSE to kill civilians, they CHOSE to bomb every hospital, every school, every refugee camp, every residential block. israel does NOTHING to spare the lives of palestinians, they want to thin out the population of gaza so they'd be able to settle their citizens there.

this is a genocide it's an ethnical cleansing PLEASE WAKE UP don't stop talking about Palestine it is not a trend, people are still dying, Israel has no plan to stop if WE don't force it to, through public pressure and protesting and boycotting. it's the least we can do.

here’s to a liberated palestine and an end to the occupation in 2024، إن شاء الله

if you support israel right now, you're supporting the extermination of the palestinian people.

it really is that simple.

this isn't a 'complicated conflict,' it isn't a situation that 'requires nuance,' it's not a 'geopolitical event' that requires us to condemn the 'bad actors' on 'both sides.'

it's a genocide.

there is no 'nuance' to be had here. it's a genocide, committed by the israeli state against the palestinian people, and it's happening right now as we speak. you don't have to infer anything: israel has openly, with next to no pushback from so-called liberal democracies, cut off gaza's access to water, food and electricity. that's more than two million palestinians denied even the basic necessities for life. a million of them, children.

what is that, if not a genocide?

and that's only the latest escalation. we could go all day, listing the atrocities the palestinian people have been subjected to. the killings, the beatings, the children sexually abused in detention center, all the hospitals and ambulances being blown up, videos of palestinians being heckled by settlers as they're driven from their homes, israelis gathering on hilltops to cheer as their military drops bombs on gaza...

but all westerns want to talk about, is hamas.

because the murder of palestinians by the IDF is status quo; it doesn't affect them. what's one more dead palestinian but a statistic? but if hamas has killed a handful of israelis — if they've go as far as to even kill babies — then that justifies the extermination of two million palestinians, children and infants included.

westerns will even say that the palestinians brought it on themselves; that they should have know that a drop of israeli blood requires a river in return.

and just so we're clear, you don't have to like hamas. but when you equate hamas with the IDF, when you derail every conversation by demanding a condemnation of 'both sides,' or when you, god forbid, agree that israel is justified in dismantling hamas — which, as israel themselves have outlined, will involve the complete destruction of gaza and the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians — then either wake up, or own up to the fact that you're a participant in the extermination of the palestinian people.

do you think i'm being harsh? then imagine how it's like living under constant aerial bombardment. with no food, no water, no electricity. constant air-raid sirens. a bomb, dropping every minute. never knowing a moment a peace, always wondering if today is going to be your last day, if you and your family are still going to be here tomorrow.

could you stomach living in gaza, for even a day? i doubt it.

and still, now, on the eve of what might be the ground invasion of gaza — with one million palestinians being told to flee, with nowhere to go — i'm getting messages from people who demand my sympathy... for israel.

well, you're not getting it.

i'm not even humoring your hand-wringing.

if you live in israel, and you're one of the ones who've turned a blind-eye to the suffering of the palestinian people, if you've fought for the IDF or tacitly supported them, if you've callously called upon the memory of the holocaust thinking the death and suffering of your ancestors would wash the blood of your own hands....

then yeah, i think you deserve every single hamas rocket lobbed at you and so much more.

Hi if you "make" ai art you're not an artist <3

The thing is, it’s actually AI people and not artists who really care more about copyright. Artists aren’t nearly as obsessed with ownership as AI users are.

Most people I’ve noticed getting popular with AI art use AI to generate pretty generic images based on familiar concepts/characters in the style of popular artists. This is because AI does better with things it has a lot of images in its dataset to draw from. There are people who do weirder stuff, but this stuff almost never gets popular except as a joke or meme, because it never produces anything that looks like a shiny art station portfolio piece.

But that leads to the question of: why generate this image with Midjourney when it’s such a familiar generic concept that you could find a very similar image with a quick google search? It wouldn’t be exactly what you’re looking for, but Midjourney is also not going to give you exactly what you’re looking for either. If you just want nice imagery and don’t care who owns the art, why not just search the internet for art that definitely already exists?

If you just want “cyberpunk city trending on artstation”, why not go to artstation and look at different people’s concept art for cyberpunk cities? If you want “pretty anime cat girl with pink hair,” why not just search for that? If you want “owl in the style of Piper Thibodeau,” why not look through their owl art? If you want “art of Walter white in a cartoony style,” why not just look at all the millions of pieces of fanart that do exactly that?

There have even been some kerfuffles where the AI takes too influence much from one image that shows up a lot, and accidentally creates an almost-exact copy of a piece of art that already exists. The person who inserted the prompt in the machine, of course, doesn’t notice or care. Even though the “art” they “created” had already existed, and they essentially just did a roundabout internet search to find it.

So the question is like… “why are so many people machine-generating things that already exist?”

And the answer is because people don’t care about finding good imagery, really— they want imagery that is “theirs” and that they “own” in some nebulous way. You can easily find a generic cyberpunk city on artstation, but it’s not your generic cyberpunk city. You can easily find generic paintings of cute anime cat girls anywhere, but they’re not “yours.” You can find cute owls or cartoony breaking bad fanart anywhere but they’re not “yours.” The appeal of AI is not that it can create something new, because it’s bad at creating new things outside its dataset. The appeal is that it can create things that feel like they are “yours.”

The point of AI is not to generate imagery. It’s to file the serial numbers off imagery that already exists.

Writers on the line: Day One (WGAcontract2023.org, 5/3/2023)

Keep seeing posts in solidarity with the WGA strike that say things like “no one cares about your favorite shows” and “fuck your tv show. I hope it gets canceled” and while I understand and agree with the underlying sentiment, which is clearly “Real people are more important than fictional ones, you dipshit” I don’t like the framing because, well, it feels shitty to dismiss the importance of the work made by the workers we’re trying to defend.

No one cares about your favorite shows more than the writers do.

No one understands the power and importance of tv and film more than the writers who created them.

No one loves tv, movies, games, and stories more than the people who fought tooth and nail in an incredibly competitive and underpaid profession for the chance to be part of it.

They know it’s important. They know it changes lives. They know it can be more than just a story, more than just a bit of entertainment. They’ve loved and respected this medium, continue to love and respect this medium, more than you ever will.

The person who wants a show to get canceled the least is the writer who poured their everything into making it good.

TV and movies are great, actually, and you are not wrong to be invested and care about them. That’s what the writers gave you. That’s what the writers wanted when they wrote it. That’s why they wrote it.

Which is why we respect them when they make the call that this strike and its demands are worth risking it.

The people on that picket line do not want their shows canceled. They want to keep writing them. They can’t, not under the current conditions.

So we accept the risk with them and support them.

But I don’t want to berate the power and importance of their work, the value they put into it and the love they have for it, in the same breath that I am defending their strike. Worthy shows will likely get canceled or derailed and that will be a tragedy worth mourning. The writers know that better than anyone.

So when they say something else is even more important, we listen. And when your favorite show gets ruined, you make sure your fully justified anger and grief is pointed in the right direction - at the CEOs who killed it.