@drlucymichael
www.irishlegal.com Redress for abuse victims urged 10 years on from O’Keeffe judgment The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission has called on the government to provide redress to all of the women who were abused as children at Dunderrow National School in the 1960s and 1970s. Leo... 
www.gofundme.com Donate to Direct Provision Christmas Toy Drive 2024, organized by Dan Lambert WE NEED YOUR HELP AGAIN THIS YEAR! In a year that's shown the worst of human… Dan Lambert needs your support for Direct Provision Christmas Toy Drive 2024 One of the things that makes me believe Palestinians, especially freelance workers who defy all odds to keep working with companies abroad, are truly extraordinary is the small, invisible battles they fight every day, battles their employers would never know about.
Sitting next to me at this hub initiative, where we gather to access electricity and internet, is a User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) designer. She’s currently working on a restaurant app for a company outside Gaza. Part of her job is to insert images of mouthwatering meals, including burgers, chicken, salads, and other dishes we haven’t eaten or even seen in over a year due to Israel’s systematic starvation policy in Gaza.
Two weeks ago, as she reviewed her project progress, she asked me for feedback: “Listen, if you were a customer wanting to order a meal on this app, do you consider it user-friendly?” I stared at her screen for a moment, then looked back at her, laughing. “Are you kidding me? I don’t care if the app is user-friendly; I’d pay anything just to have this food.”
We both laughed, but then I asked seriously, “Doesn’t this feel like torture? Staring at pictures of food for hours.. don’t you crave it?”
This is something I’ve actually wondered often. Here in this space, dozens of designers work on projects for companies abroad. Many of them are creating restaurant apps or promotional posters for meals, designing them to make customers crave those dishes.
They have to imagine what would entice a customer to buy that meal and put themselves in their shoes. But how do they do that? How do they step into the shoes of someone who is likely overwhelmed by the abundance of food choices around them, while they themselves are struggling to get basic food just to stay alive?
The designer said that she does crave the dishes she inserts into the app, dishes that the people ordering them likely take for granted. But you know what’s more torturous than not being able to have these dishes now? The fact that we know exactly how they taste. There was nothing more common in Gaza than restaurants and coffee shops serving dishes that rivaled the most luxurious hotels worldwide, offering high-quality food at affordable prices, something that's considered a miracle given the 17-year-old blockade and Israeli restrictions.
Today, the first thing the Israeli occupation army does during any ground invasion in Gaza is target hotels and restaurants, bombing them into rubble and then filming themselves celebrating as the flames consume what’s left, a systematic policy to crush the spirit of Gazans.
For the past year, Palestinians in northern Gaza haven’t eaten vegetables or seen meat. A friend in Gaza City told me that her one-year-old son doesn’t even know what fruits are, as he has never seen them since birth. In the humanitarian zone here, the situation is hardly any better. We haven’t eaten meat or seen eggs in months, the scarce vegetables available are outrageously priced. The Israeli occupation has sealed all of Gaza’s borders, preventing the entry of goods or food. On the rare occasion that trucks are allowed through, the Israeli army coordinates with, encourages, and protects organized gangs to looted them before reaching their intended destinations. As a result, we are now enduring a severe bread crisis due to the lack of wheat flour. It is fair to say that what is being practiced today is an engineered, systematic starvation of Gaza’s entire population.
So here we are, this designer, who hasn’t eaten bread in about a week, must suppress her hunger and sit down to continue inserting images of mouthwatering dishes, ensuring the “perfect user experience” for people on the other side of the world.
PS: I actually took this picture about two weeks ago. I genuinely don’t know why I suddenly felt compelled to write this now as I read the news that three Palestinian women reportedly died in a stampede in front of a bakery that partially opened this morning in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip.View quoted post on X
People who say you get more conservative as you get older are just projecting their own personal shittiness onto everyone else. I get more radicalized by the year. It's not even about older people having more wealth to protect; I'm making more than ever before and I still want to obliterate capitalism. You get more conservative and right wing as you get older if you fail to grow as you age. It just means you've been wasting your time on this planet and allowing yourself to become intellectually lazy and morally stagnant.View quoted post on X
