@dewitty1 / dewitty1.tumblr.com
TWO HOURS AGO: an incredible photo taken by a ut austin student capturing something deeply poetic in my opinion, a line of state troopers eagerly waiting to arrest student protesters standing just behind a sign that reads "what starts here changes the world. its starts with you and what you do each day."
I just think it's Amazing how the US has money to fund war crimes and help Israel commit genocide, but we can't have Healthcare or food stamps or do anything about homelessness.
Most people won't go to the hospital unless it's an emergency bc it's too expensive, but there is money galore for ethnic cleansing.
The right to exist goes both ways.
Almost 200 people were murdered in Armenia in 3 days and y'all are still ignoring us.
This is not a war, this is a massacre Azerbaijan and Turkey are committing against the Armenian people.
Turkey's president literally admitted that he wants to finish what his ancestors started. He wants to commit another genocide, and this time he wants to kill us all.
Silence is violence
Update: it's been over a month. 2 thousand people were murdered so far. Please, I'm so scared, just reblog this. I'm not asking for a lot, if you can't donate that's fine, just share this.
If anyone knows where TO donate please interact?!
@rock-and-roll-and-rats Thank you so much, I'm so grateful
I don’t study genocides war crimes and human rights for fun. I study it bc my people have been at the foot from the very first genocide of the 20th century and previous attempts to exterminate my entire race. The fact that no one is speaking up when another genocide is at the brink of occurring to the ethnic Armenians living in Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) is mind blowing. I have to say I’m not surprised by the lack of effort - Americans, especially, are the most self interested humans I’ve met. This isn’t about narrative, this is about rapid belligerent individualism. We can philosophize all day about it but at the end - people don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. There is rarely any altruism left in this world. As Monte said, no ones gonna fight for us, we will have to fight on our own to survive. The alternative is not an option.
@sarinezeitlian on IG for the photos
When we talk about colonization and genocide in the Americas, we are often met with the same statement:
“This happened hundreds of years ago, get over it”.
Sure, it started centuries ago. But it didn’t end hundreds of years ago, or one hundred, or even 50.
When we talk about these issues, we don’t just mean small pox-infected blankets, or forced migration. We don’t just mean settlements, bounties on our heads, the physical attacks on our villages. We don’t just mean the residential schools, or the laws that banned our traditional languages and practices.
We mean:
- The Sixties Scoop, when Indigenous children were ripped from their communities to be placed with white families.
- Residential schools, the last of which only closed in 1996, where children were forced to give up their languages, culture, identity, and were abused horribly.
- The Millennium Scoop. The child welfare system in Canada is still ripping children from Indigenous communities. Despite only making up about 8% of the age demographic, Indigenous youths under 14 account for more than half of the foster system. (x)
- 80% of reserves in Canada have median incomes that fall below the poverty line (x)
- A vast number of reserves in Canada do not have clean drinking water (x)
- Indigenous rights and land titles are routinely ignored in order to create pipelines and sell off resources. (x)
- According to Indigenous women’s groups, there are approximately 4,000 cases of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The RCMP only acknowledge about 1200 of these. (x)
- “Between 1997 and 2000, the homicide rate for Indigenous women was nearly seven times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous women.” (x)
- A man literally confessed to the murder of Tina Fontaine, a 15 year old Indigenous girl, and he was acquitted. (x)
- Colten Boushie, a Cree man, was shot multiple times by a Saskatchewan farmer. A jury featuring no Indigenous people declared his murderer not guilty. (x)
- The Starlight Tours. Saskatoon Police routinely took intoxicated Indigenous men outside of the city in sub-zero temperatures and left them to find their way back. Several froze to death. The Saskatoon Police were caught deleting the article about this from Wikipedia. (x)
- Suicide and self injury are the leading cause of death for Indigenous men under 44. In addition, the rate of suicide in Indigenous women is seven times higher than that of non-Indigenous women, and the rate of suicide among Indigenous men is 5.25 times higher than that of non-Indigenous men. Suicide rates for Inuit youth are among the highest in the world, at 11 times the national average. (x) In certain communities, like Attawapiskat, suicides reach epidemic levels. (x)
These are just a few of the many legacies of colonization that impact us today.
This is colonialism. This is genocide.
It never stopped.
(please add more to this list)
Update:
- Starlight Tours have been recorded in Calgary as recently as mid-October 2018. Facebook posts about it have been vanishing from accounts soon after reposting.
Another update for those not following recent events:
- The Canadian government and RCMP carried out a heavily militarized attack on Wet’suwet’en people defending their unceded territory from an illegal pipeline this week.
This is land that does not belong to the goverment. It is land that according to the government’s own laws, and more importantly Wet’suwet’en laws, can’t be taken by Canada.
This is colonization in action.
Can we also talk about how the RCMP murdered sled-dogs en mass in the 60s to destroy the Inuit way of life and force them into cities. [X] The Canadian Film board even did a documentary about it.
Or when the RCMP raided the Listuguj Mi'kmaq First Nation in 1981. [X] While the Canadian Film Board reluctantly agreed to fund Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s film about the raids, they wouldn’t let her interview “any white people” (which she did anyway, because fuck them).
Or when they brought in snipers, assault rifles, and dogs to “serve an injunction” again the Mi’kmaq anti-shale gas encampment protesting Texas-based SWN Resources “exploration” around Elsipogtog in 2013.
Aside from the two warriors who were jailed without charge for nine months, the province also sought out legal damages against others involved as a scare tactic. One of them was land defender Annie Clair.
Not to mention the fact that Boat Harbour is still a toxic stew that’s been killing the people Pictou Landing First Nation for decades. I attended an information session with some members of the reserve back in 2014, all the “strange and rare cancers” that people keep getting, witnesses breaking down crying as they talked about the slow but seemingly inevitable loss of loved ones.
I’m a settler myself, though people in my family through marriage are Mi’kmaq and I want to do what I can to help support them and the peoples of the coast. My father grew up poor in Pictou county, and said that when the wind turned you could smell the death coming from the mill.
I know this is systemic, and bigger than any one person, but when I express my particular repugnance for Trudeau, who posed in the teepees and wore the headdresses, and promised (like they always promise) that things will be better this time the predictable liberal response of “what!? so you want Canada to have it’s own TRuMp!?” feels vile.
If you’ve been listening, for many indigenous people in Canada, every prime minister has been a Trump to them, the only difference seems to be whether they smile or frown while they do it….
my primary reaction to infinity war is like…. wow. under hypercapitalism we literally can’t imagine any other fables about resource scarcity, huh?
i’m not even talking about only thanos. every time thanos said his plan to kill half the galaxy (because it’s “finite,” lol ok one-semester-of-econ guy) the other characters were like “no!” or “you can’t!” or “that’s madness!” instead of… counter-arguing, or saying anything like “couldn’t you just… double the resources with a snap of your fingers?” obviously, nobody wants thanos to murder all those people, but it’s also as if everyone tacitly accepts his framing of the problem. “i want to kill half the universe because of resource scarcity,” he says, and everyone says “no, that’s too cruel!!” instead of “wait… wait just a fucking second there, paul ryan.” they don’t even have a line like that even when they’re talking amongst themselves, just musing at how twisted his worldview is, that he can only imagine infinite power as an infinite power to kill. no time is spent imagining an alternative.
and i can’t help but think about how we in the quote-unquote “first world” treat the resource consumption of the so-called “developing world.” we, who have enjoyed the pleasures and benefits of fridges and air conditioning and televisions and cars and convenience food and all that shit for generations: we look at the growing energy & plastics consumption of the developing world and go “uh oh, they’re really running the tab up over there, we can’t let this happen, think of the…. trees!!!” we have the audacity to act like people living in poverty in the tropics wanting window fans is selfish and short-sighted for the environment, and meanwhile we use and waste all the energy and resources we can get ahold of, like a continent full of montgomery burnses.
infinity war could have taken thanos’s approach to scarcity somewhere bigger: somewhere that was useful as a parable for our hypocrisy. the way that ragnarok was brave enough to make a parable of empire; the way that black panther could explore diaspora and identity; the way that the winter soldier actually had something to say about the surveillance-terror state. but for all the moving pieces of infinity war, i don’t think it knew where its central ethic rested. certainly, its characters showed the desire to preserve and protect life. but that’s true of any superhero film.
what it comes down to for me, is that it’s not enough for this movie’s theme to be “let’s protect people, because killing people is bad!” or even, sorry steve, “we don’t trade lives.” it’s not enough. thanos basically says, “there’s one bowl of soup and one spoon and two hungry people, so one of them has to die.” so what i needed was someone to openly reject that whole proposition. not just “no, you shouldn’t kill trillions,” but “no, that is fucking ludicrous, i reject that worldview. i reject human life as a brutal competition. group survival, even in the face of scarcity or hardship, is exactly what the fuck we developed culture for.” like, we could use that message. that message, delivered palatably in a blockbuster action movie, could do some good.
but it wasn’t really in there. maybe in little bits, in pieces. maybe. so i’m sure we’re going to have to endure a bunch of “welllll, thanos was a bad guy, but he did have a point about scarcity” metas. because we’re still failing to see how asking other people to die so that the rest can enjoy plenty is itself exactly the fucking problem on this bitch of an earth
i will acknowledge that gamora comes the closest to doing this. gamora comes down on thanos for slaughtering half her planet. but!! but! then thanos gets this horrible line about how the children who grew up after his genocide got to have “full bellies” and the planet’s a “utopia” now. and what does gamora get to say back to that? nothing! she doesn’t get a line after that! she looks angry and grief-stricken, but the writers don’t give her a single fucking thing to say in disagreement!! like, how about: “growing up as a traumatized survivor of genocide isn’t very fucking utopian????” the writers couldn’t imagine that fucking line?
Yay I’m not the only one who thought, “Oh no, at some point I’m going to inevitably run into some jackhole trying to defend Thanos as having a point…”, and “OR you could just create more resources and distribute them equitably?”
I was so fucking pissed about that, because we KNOW what happens to cultures when substantial percentages of the population are eradicated by famine or disease or war. It is not a good time! It is not twenty years later and everyone’s well fed! Because if you eradicate 50% of a population, you destroy labour, you destroy infrastructure, you screw absolutely everything for the survivors.
THIS! Halving the population vs doubling the population hypothetically has the SAME DAMN EFFECT on population growth. Unless Thanos’ actual goal was to cripple the population in the way the previous post mentions.
And don’t think for a fucking minute that Thanos is not an unreliable source for what’s happening on Gamora’s planet.
The longer this movie sits, the angrier I get. I will not be seeing it a second time in theaters.
I haven’t seen any of those movies, but this strikes me as a Necessary Take on a villain in 2018 spouting college-student overpopulation rhetoric.
I am not a fan of college-student overpopulation rhetoric.
I am … Even less a fan of this big-budget franchise choosing it as a motive in 2018.
There have been many genocides in human history, and not one of those populations has bounced back with a cheery “Gosh, with all THOSE fuckers gone, I can finally stuff my face with croissants and accumulate wealth!”
The only way that killing some people results in other people getting more stuff is if you kill the people who hoard disproportionate amounts of The Most Stuff, and take their stuff on behalf of people who have less stuff. And that is called a Revolution, and that is frowned upon and considered antisocial in most circumstances. Stuff is distributed unequally. It’s a fact. Killing half of people does not magically free up 50% more stuff.
I don’t know how seriously people take the “finite amount of energy in the universe” thing, but it’s something that creationists attempt to use to bully everyone else. The idea is that it makes evolution seem improbable, “because entropy.” Under creationism, “entropy” means “things inevitably getting worse” and it fits in well with their view of the world. They think it’s physics. Creationists say “energy in a system dissipates”, and ask how life could evolve and be complex without God to power it.
The gentle stock response is that Earth is not a closed system. It receives a constant source of energy. This energy comes from the Sun. We have a direct conduit to a sufficient amount of energy to power the life force of the planet, in terms of Making And Eating Stuff. The Sun shines on the Earth, it grows the plants, and everything eats the plants or each other. (All of the other stuff happening on Earth is basically recreation.) but while the Sun will one day burn out, the plants do not eat up the Sun. Even if every square inch of the sinful earth was covered in greedy trees and cabbages, the Sun would continue to shine on it. That’s the energy source. It’s. The Sun. It’s usually up there somewhere.
So, like, if people are justifying genocide with “oh well, there was limited energy in the universe” then, like, do these Marvel movies take place somewhere without anyone having heard of the Sun? Does their planet have a plug leading out the back, that’s plugged into a big pot of fossil fuels? Does everyone have a mild concussion that makes teenage-philosophy-Discourse sound edgy and deep? Is the Sun in their universe actually just a Chris in a very large hat? This piece of lore worries and vexes me
One of the big names in population and resource theories was Malthus, who a bit before the industrial revolution theorised that humanity was on its way to a cataclysmic event due to population increase and subsequent resource scarcity. His theories proved false, however, when the industrial revolution came along and we started producing more food, allowing us to support the population. His issue was that he didn’t take into account human ingenuity, or compassion. Now, I’m not trying to say the industrial revolution was all roses and puppy dogs for the majority of humanity (there was some pretty horrific stuff going on in a lot of places) but it got us through without near - extinction. And we’ve continued to develop and increase our ability to support more people, not just with food but energy, medicine, and a myriad of other resources. And again, the system is far from perfect, there are shortages all over the world and capitalism is terrible, but the point is if we could get our socialist butts in gear long enough to distribute things evenly then literally no one would have to go without. The issue isn’t resources this time, it’s distribution and a few assholes at the top making it difficult for everyone.
