{"id":4698,"date":"2025-08-31T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/?p=4698"},"modified":"2025-08-30T21:51:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T04:51:15","slug":"two-weeks-in-the-life-august-31-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/?p=4698","title":{"rendered":"Two Weeks in the Life: August 31, 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hello, friends and enemies. Some exciting news in my world is that the dates and location for Eurovision 2026 have been announced<\/a>! It’s going to be in Vienna on the week of my birthday! The announcement was at night in my time zone, so the next morning I went about reserving a hotel, thinking I was getting on it fairly early. Not so. There were already hotels in Vienna that are completely booked up that week, which is truly wild. Fortunately, I did find a good hotel for us, and reservations have been made. We haven’t solidified any other plans yet, but that was an important one to get done early! This has also made me more motivated to study some German, which I was admittedly not feeling super excited about. Now that we have some real plans, it’s a little more fun. The youtube algorithm showed me this video<\/a> of a woman explaining German words to use in the bakery and I was like, wow I’m sold. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Books and Other Words<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n
\"hardback<\/a>
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This<\/a> by Omar El Akkad is an indictment of the powers and systems that not just allow a genocide, but actively promote it. When it becomes convenient and politically safe to do so and when, as El Akkad writes, “When the time comes to assign blame, most of those to blame will be long gone,” politicians and others in power will finally say that they had always been against this. El Akkad is a journalist grew up in the Middle East and moved to Canada as a teenager. As a child, he associated the West with freedom, but it’s not nearly as free here as our reputation makes it out to be, especially when you’re brown and an immigrant. The United States in particular believes it “behaves in keeping with the scrappy righteousness of the underdog” while simultaneously being the “most powerful nation in human history.” If you think you’re a freedom fighter, but you’re actually the country with the world’s largest military, who do you fight to show that you’re fighting on the side of good? How do you prove that you’re a scrappy underdog? Apparently, you arm a regime committing a genocide. Because we need to fight people who are, “in our minds” capable of “limitless violence.” El Akkad also discusses journalism and the misguided belief that journalists should act as a kind of impartial “referee,” but being truly unbiased is not possible and only makes you susceptible to a different set of biases, like that it’s important to find a compromise between both sides. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Should one party propose stripping immigrants of all rights and the other propose stripping them of only some rights, the intellectually rigorous thing to do is consider that’s what’s best is stripping immigrants of most rights. To compromise.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This <\/em>is a scathing assessment of those with the power and privilege to do something, but who cannot “bear the minor inconvenience of hearing about these deaths from afar.” What Israel is doing to the Palestinian people is atrocious and it is a genocide. I was watching the news the other night and it’s very clear that everyone there is being starved to death, that is if if Israeli soldiers<\/a> aren’t murdering<\/a> them while they<\/a> wait for food<\/a>. It’s easy to be opposed to something terrible that is already happened. It takes a lot more courage to do something in opposition to the status quo. I hope that our country stops supporting this before everyone is dead and it when, of course, everyone will have been against it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, on the internet:<\/p>\n\n\n\n