Not to mention “in what has been characterized as a massacre”. Just… wow.
Currently, 7 hours after the original post was made, the first section of the wikipedia article has changed to this.
The changing of the article title to “Al-Rashid Massacre” is under discussion, and also was in the original post. Someone made the title say humanitarian aid incident when the article was made, but there is serious disagreement. Wikipedia titles cannot be easily edited like the text of the article, and so discussion is needed. This is just how wikipedia works, and when pretty much anyone can edit it you are going to get things like this. This is not a reason to avoid giving money to wikipedia, and while the stuff shown in the original screenshot was very bad, it is being fixed (and fairly rapidly).
Wikipedia and any biases it has cannot be treated the same way as that of something like a news organization. Getting upset at wikipedia as a whole for something that most editors seem to disagree with and are working to change doesn’t really make sense.
Holy shit, an active duty American soldier set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. Before he set himself on fire he introduced himself as “an active duty member of the U.S. Airforce I will no longer be complicit in genocide.” Then repeated “free Palestine” while he was on fire. He did it while wearing his duty uniform too. There is footage of the act. I don’t know how I feel about posting images of a man’s self-immolation but it’s such an unprecedented action to be almost unbelievable without visual evidence. Even with the several self-immolations that occurred on American soil during the Vietnam and Iraq wars, I don’t think I can point to one undertaken by an active duty soldier. I will instead link to the Twitter post where it was first made public under the “more” cut below. It goes without saying that the image is graphic.
Jesus, I just saw this on Twitter. I’m shocked the reporter even put up that one screencap. It may not show the damage he’ll suffer moments later, but it’s so disturbing to see.
Some more information:
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As of a little while ago, the protester was still alive:
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There is a man on fire. Others will call him insane, but he is a sane man in a mad world. Free Palestine
i do think there is a degree to which certain kinds of Instagram activists have convinced themselves that traumatising themselves in solidarity is a useful form of activism. “I’m having nightmares and crying so much I want to be sick because of all these videos of dying children but I can’t look away while people are getting hurt” I mean don’t you think you’d be able to help more if you weren’t having nightmares and crying all the time?? don’t you think this is a one-way trip to burnout? don’t you think maybe increasing the amount of trauma going around is counterproductive? I dunno bro there’s something to be said for bearing witness but there comes a point where you gotta look hard at yourself and go “am I helping, or am I just making myself suffer so I don’t feel guilty for not suffering while somebody else is experiencing bad shit”
I say “there is no such thing as a thought crime” a lot on my blog. Well, the other side of the coin is there is also no such thing as thought heroics, thought charity or thought activism.
25-35 is such a weird fucking age because you’re 100% a bread-and-butter Standard Edition Millennial but the cool teens are like “ok boomer” because you have a Real Job but the actual Boomers at your job are like “I’m not going to listen to a literal fucking child” as they download 16 self-replicating viruses and meanwhile the Gen Xers are telling you to refinance a mortgage for a house you don’t have and you’re sitting there at the Adults Table with the pretty tasty casserole you cooked because you’ve finally figured out how to do that now but everyone is eating the Boomer’s store-bought macaroni instead and admittedly they do sort of taste similar so it probably wasn’t worth all the trouble of cooking from scratch and you’re trying to comfort the freshly-graduated sobbing 22-year-old next to you because she just woke up here and doesn’t know where she is but you have like maybe 5k dollars in a savings account labelled RETIREMENT that grows approx. twelve cents a year and you keep eating dry macaroni while smiling incomprehensibly and periodically blacking out like ??????????
StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 ½, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 ½ were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.
stumbleupon not existing anymore can be directly traced to a dramatic decline in my mental health, I could do a thesis on it.
bestie stumbleupon very much still exists its just called cloudhiker now. i use it all the time.
mini compilation of suggestions from the replies:
The Bored Button - “Press the Bored Button and be bored no more.”
Cloudhiker - “Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet” (not really a rebrand, it’s a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)
Astronaut.io - “These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).”
Marginalia - “This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.”
literally saw someone the other day say it’s ✨pretentious✨ to have a website if you have nothing to sell, and I was like bestie do you not know that there was a glorious time when everyone and their mother had websites for no reason except it was fun and they could?? have you drunk so deeply of the capitalism juice that you now see no reason for the internet to exist except to sell things
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