DONT STOP TALKING ABOUT PALESTINE! DONT STOP TAKING ABOUT GAZA!

DONT STOP TALKING ABOUT PALESTINE! DONT STOP TAKING ABOUT GAZA!

DONT LET THEM MAKE YOU FORGET!!

For those who don't know, Rafah Crossing is closed. Meaning Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are technically not allowed to go into Egypt through Rafah Crossing (with exceptions, like holding a foreign passport) so in order to evacuate, Palestinians need to bribe Egyptian border security officials. The standard price used to be about $5000 - 7000 per person but some Palestinians have been told to pay $10,000 per person just to cross the border, forget other expenses like food and boarding.

For a group of people who are enduring genocide and the complete destruction of their homes that money is impossible to raise without the help of fundraising. That and the collapse of the UNRWA is the reason you're seeing so many Gofundmes nowadays. The entire aid system is gone with the exception of local aid organisations that have limited reach.

So if you see a credible fundraiser, please at the very least share it so it can reach more people. This list by @el-shab-hussein is a good place to start.

"I know JK Rowing is a terrible person but her books are so good-"

You sure about that?

I mean, just for a start, have you taken a good look at her fantasy creatures lately? A whole bunch of them are straight-up based on malicious and dehumanizing stereotypes about actual people.

Remember the werewolves? And being a werewolf was made into a kind of metaphor for having AIDS?

And you know how AIDS was first associated with gay men? And how conservatives back in the day were claiming gay men were preying on children in order to convert them to gayness?

Remember how Fenrir Greyback preyed on children in particular? Yeah, she put that subtext in there. She was an adult in the 90's. She knew damn well what she was doing.

Remember the house elves? Remember how most of them loved to serve and needed to have a home and a master or else they just wouldn't know what to do with themselves?

Did you know that's literally what slavers in the American South said about the Black people they kept enslaved? Go look up the happy slave myth.

Do I even need to get into the goblins and the antisemitic tropes they're based on? No, folkloric goblins were not gold-hoarding bankers waiting for their chance to stab humanity in the back.

"But the characters are so good!"

Are you kidding me?

Most of her characters are pretty one-dimensional, including Harry. Her idea of making a morally complicated character is giving a tragic past to a bully. Numerous characters are little more than stereotypes. (Looking at Fleur right now.) Literally anybody, including you, can easily make dozens of characters just as good, if not better. (It doesn't exactly take a lot of character designing skill to go, "hey, actually, having a sad backstory doesn't make it okay to bully children" or "hey, maybe I should not base a character on the first stereotype that pops into my head.")

"But the rest of the worldbuilding!"

Sorry, but her worldbuilding is just as basic as her characters. Magical castles and secret passages are stock tropes. Magical people who keep their true nature secret from humanity is the premise of pretty much every White Wolf TTRPG. Most of her fantasy creatures are just common European fairy tale and folklore creatures with shitty stereotypes projected onto them.

I'm not saying "basic worldbuilding bad." I'm saying, you could do just as good, if not better, with minimal effort.

Also there's her magical bioessentialism, where only Harry's abusive blood relatives could provide him with supernatural protection from Voldemort. Rowling thus effectively declared that non-biological family isn't quite real family, and that abusive biofamily can give you some essential thing that a loving, supportive family that isn't related to you just can't.

The Hogwarts houses are one of the most insidious elements of her worldbuilding. The idea of being sorted gives you a little dopamine hit because wow now you have a li'l niche where you belong!

But the actual function of the houses and sorting system and the House Cup is teaching children to see each other as rivals, and ensure that the most toxic views of the upper class get passed on to every new batch of kids sorted into Slytherin.

Hogwarts effectively prepares children for a dystopia where magic serves to distract its citizens from how nightmarishly awful it is. Economic inequality is so bad that people like Arthur and Molly Weasley can barely afford to put their kids through school, casual sadism is just an accepted norm in everyday society, and non-humans are second class citizens. Rowling sorta acts like she thinks this is a bad thing with certain lines she gave to Dumbledore, but in the end, her special boy protagonist becomes an auror; IE, a defender of the status quo. So.

If you've never seen it, Lily Simpson's video goes into even more detail on how the worldbuilding of Harry Potter is actually incredibly fucked up, and how it betrays small-minded attitudes on Rowling's part. There's no separating the art from this artist, because Rowling's rotten values pour out of nearly every page.

Yes, there are many things in Harry Potter that evoke feelings and inspire people, but there's absolutely nothing in it that this series has a monopoly on. You can find those same experiences in much, much better media.

Someone: Very clearly, explicitly explains that every single species of invertebrate is important in some way to the environment and how insect populations keep dropping which could literally cause ecological collapse if they were to all go extinct

Some absolute genius, every single fucking time: This is it......... This is the perfect post to talk about how much I hate mosquitos/ticks/spiders/wasps on and go "Haha but those icky bad evil mean bugs I hate are an exception right lol???"

i see a lot of people talking about books they had to read at school like great gatsby and whatnot, and i have no idea what that's about, so i'd like to know if the books people here on tumblr had to read at school are "the same" as the ones i had to read at school, being from a non-english country.

i'm genuenly intrigued about what the books people elsewhere had to read were about and are there any similarities? honestly i just need to know fucked are other countries' favoured literary analysis works