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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It is complex and yet it isn’t. There are understandable psychological and historical causes for the current state. It is not black and white. But nothing is. We just want to make things to fit nice boxes.

    If you want to understand it, you need to understand radicalization and how it applies to MENA including Israel. Actions do not come from the vacuum and people are messy. Every person has an agenda.

    At the same time, in this specific situation, there are what according to well-established parameters amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. While there is terrorism committed by Palestinian groups, these crimes are largely committed by Israel. It might be that if the power imbalance were a little less we would see similar actions from the Palestinian state. But it is not.

    Just in the last week, we have seen apartheid, ethnic cleansing, what could be genocide, collective punishment, embargo and cutting vital supplies to the area you are occupying. This list is not exhaustive. This is univocally wrong.

    The most complex part is not understanding it. The most complex part is solving it.





  • I didn’t say it is worse than it ever was. Just saying it is not the best it ever was either.

    My perspective comes from the fact that I am an aid worker and human rights activist. This has nothing to do with online discourse. My perspective is also not only found in online echo chambers. It is common among my colleagues. I am not referring to Twitter dying. I don’t care about that. And yes, activism is at least in my field of activism pretty damn ineffective. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying.


  • While the number of wars is less than 20 years ago there is an uneven but increasing trend for the past decade. Last year casualties were also more than at least 89 apart from a huge spike in 94. Amount of refugees has also been increasing in the past decade a little bit faster than the world population has.

    Despite these facts, globally things are not at least yet out of hand. At the same time, there are many countries, especially in the West where current politicians are dismantling social security nets and human rights legislation. We are also increasingly seeing the effect of climate change on conflicts and displacement. Famine is thankfully rarer than ever before but we are so badly behind on any environmental action that it is pretty much guaranteed to happen more and more. I might be less pessimistic if the climate crisis weren’t staring us right at our faces. In general, historically things have gotten better and better with some lows. If we had time, we could probably sort ourselves out. There are also a lot of very smart people that could help with the existential threat but after the past decade, I don’t trust that they will be allowed to fix it.

    You can also only be almost completely anonymous if you know what you are doing. The majority of people don’t know how. While data gathered from default users might officially be anonymized, the amount of data collected will often make you pretty easily identified. Zero-click spyware that has already been used against political opponents while not relevant to most average Joes do exist.

    The world can’t be pulled up by your bootstraps. Most defeating is that you can do anything in your power and things still get worse. Yes, I might have more than a touch of secondary trauma but activism these days feels like hitting your head on the wall repeatedly. You can’t stop people from dying. You risk ending up in jail in too many countries that you once thought were civilized. And you are once again marching again Nazis when they sit in parliament in too many countries.









  • I am crossing this divide now. I have secondary education but no university and I am working to get to med school now (In Finland it is a combined undergrad and med school). I think I can do it but I don’t really know how to study. I know how to learn but learning in schedule is the issue. I was too ill to go to university when I should have and I could have gone to easier courses I could have gone to without an entrance exam and done OK but I always wanted medicine. Or well, I not easier but easier to get into like maths. After I got better I ended up in aid work, and stopping that is really hard. But I still want to become a doctor so I am trying now in my thirties. Having what looks like undiagnosed ADHD that is now under investigation and crappy childhood might explain part of why I never became what people felt I should have but the fact that I never had to learn to study because I didn’t need to get through is up there.

    I try to remember that our education does not mean anything for our value, but it seems hard when it comes to you.



  • I think having a digital ID system is very important in the modern age but where it is required needs to be limited. You should not need to use it where it isn’t strictly necessary. We have one in Finland too. You will almost entirely use it to use official services that would need your ID in person as well. In this proposal, the issue is not digital ID but how it would be used. First, where it would be used could compromise revealing too much of your identity when you want privacy and secondly and more importantly, it could compromise revealing your private actions to the government. Latter can move into highly problematic territory when criminalizing actions that should not be criminalized.