![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mar. 8th, 2025 05:42 am
some good things and on boycotts
- Powerful speeches from trans Reps in Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell delivered on Montana House floor flips dozens of Republican votes and kill 2 anti-trans bills.
- Dr Michelle Monje was awarded the Brain Prize. Dr. Monje's lab is one of the places that the Neev Kolte & Brave Ronil Foundation supported with their donations. Her research into DIPG and treatment has led to the complete recovery of one patient in clinical trials, giving hope to children diagnosed with DIPG, and also possibly leading to treatments for other cancers.
- Michael Sheen writes off over $1m of debt for 900 people using his own money.
- A new study from Stanford Med taps AI to find a naturally occurring molecule that works similarly to Ozempic, without the side effects.
- A small biotech lab in China made a new lung cancer drug that's twice as effective as the current biggest cancer drug on the market.
- BDS - this is a multi-decade movement aimed at disrupting businesses that support Israeli apartheid. There is a recent debate about whether No Other Land, the Oscar-winning Palestinian/Israeli documentary about apartheid in the West Bank, should be on the boycott list or not, due to its perceived "normalization" of Zionism. (Side note: almost impossible to find a non-Israeli source about the boycott via search or the actual BDS statement without a lot of digging, really annoying. So much for impartiality.) I follow a lot of the BDS stuff, so I agree with them on a lot of things, but I disagree on this one. If you read the critique of the BDS statement, you'll see there's a class component to it as well as the different circumstances between Palestinians who live in the West Bank and are suffering under Israeli occupation and Palestinians in diaspora who are a bit more removed from the day-to-day violence.
- We're going to see No Other Land today. I do not see a point in boycotting any Palestinian work as most of it is already so marginalized. It is an incredible achievement for this work to break through the censorship in Hollywood, and the thing is, we are starting to have Palestinian/Arab/Muslim art and work that does stand on its own and unapologetic about their politics and point of view. See Mo, Ramy, etc. Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammad El-Kurd, which is a searing critique of Western treatment of Palestinians is a NYT bestseller. (Have this one, haven't read it yet.) It also goes to show that there is no such thing as a Palestinian monolith, as the existence of multiple political parties show. The one thing they all agree on is Palestinian self-determination and rights. How we get there is going to be a process.
- PEN America Boycott still stands.
- TeslaTakedown's been pretty effective, I think.
- The one day Feb 28 boycott seems to have had some noticeable effect. There is now a Target Fast in effect for Lent, led by black faith leaders. (Gonna be honest, this one's going to be difficult for me. I love Target.)
- I think of the boycotts as a marathon, not a race. You know, like how Rome wasn't built in a day. I'm not going to boycott Google (impossible for me to) but other people can have at it. It took us a while, but we no longer buy soda at all, and we stopped going to fast food restaurants for the most part, and also chain restaurants. It turns out...we prefer local, independent restaurants anyway. I've dropped a bunch of my Amazon subscribe & saves and downloaded my Kindle ebooks. The Kindle has not really worked out for me...I keep forgetting it exists and it turns out I really like reading on paper.