Short Summary Of The Situation In Sudan

short summary of the situation in Sudan

hot takes on AOC saying that the United States government is operating concentration camps:

WARNING: This post contains references to gruesome human rights violations. It is not for everyone.

76 people in a cell designed for 12.

155 people in a cell designed for 35.

41 in a cell for 8.

Don’t look away.

900 people total, or or more than seven times the 125-person capacity of the El Paso Del Norte immigration processing center.

If it weren’t for the white boxes shielding the faces of dozens of men and women stuffed into the overcrowded cell, it would be difficult to count the people in the photograph, since their overlapping limbs make it impossible to see where one body ends and another begins.

Standing room only cells, where people are held for weeks. Limited access to showers and clean clothes, resulting in those held wearing soiled clothing “for days or weeks.”

People standing on toilets just to find air to breathe. 24 deaths while in ICE custody.

Johana Mediana Léon, 25 years old. Transgender. Passed away four days after release from custody after complaining of chest pains.

Mergensana Amar, 40 years old. Removed from life support after committing suicide in custody.

Efrain De La Rosa, 40 years old. Committed suicide in custody by self-inflicted strangulation.

Roxana Hernandez, 33 years old. Transgender. Passed away in custody after experiencing cardiac arrest.

300,000-500,000 individuals per year in custody. Acting ICE director Mark Morgan’s response? Plans to increase large scale raids.

Don’t look away.

They’re not “centers.” They’re not “facilities.” They’re not “processing areas.” Let’s call them what they are.

The United States government is operating concentration camps. And we must act.

Memos surfaced by journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s failure to provide medical care was responsible for suicides and other deaths of detainees. These followed another report that showed that thousands of detainees are being brutally held in isolation cells just for being transgender or mentally ill.

Two weeks ago, the Trump administration cut funding for classes, recreation and legal aid at detention centers holding minors — which were likened to “summer camps” by a senior ICE official last year. And there was the revelation that months after being torn from their parents’ arms, 37 children were locked in vans for up to 39 hours in the parking lot of a detention center outside Port Isabel, Texas. In the last year, at least seven migrant children have died in federal custody.

Don’t look away.

It’s certainly been helpful for the Trump Administration that nobody has called them concentration camps until this week, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came under great fire for doing so.

It may well be a testament to the media machine that is the Trump administration. Look away! He wore an ill-fitting tuxedo to meet the Queen! Look away! He won’t acknowledge that the Central Park Five are exonerated! Look away! He fired pollsters for giving him numbers that he didn’t like!

Don’t look away.

It’s helpful to the President that the media covers these human rights abuses intermittently instead of as what they actually are: proof of a racist administration, unchecked by the law. It’s helpful that there’s so much else to look at right now. But more than anything else, it’s helpful that the places where these people are being tortured and left to die are hidden. They’re locked away from the eyes of journalists and concerned members of the public. They’re misleadingly named.

That’s what a concentration camp is. And the immediate outrage to AOC calling them that is the right response. Hearing that the government is running concentration camps is something one should feel scrupulous towards. A concentration camp isn’t the same as a death camp. We don’t have those yet. But when Hitler ran his, they started as the former, extending to the latter.

Don’t look away.

Hannah Arendt, imprisoned by the Gestapo and interned in a French camp, wrote about the levels of concentration camps. Extermination camps were the most extreme; others were just about getting “undesirable elements … out of the way.” All had one thing in common: “The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.”

Is that not what we were doing?

I hesitate to speak for my own ancestry, for my family members killed at Neuengamme camp along with more than 43,000 others. But I can’t hesitate long enough to sway my thinking away from confirming what AOC already said.

It’s easy to think of the Holocaust only in terms of the final outcome. But there was a beginning.

Don’t look away. It started with fear mongering. It started with ghettoization. It started with hidden camps. Then, the pogroms. Then, the extermination camps.

Mass detention isn’t new. But this president has made it a centerpiece of his rhetoric and his agenda. He’s perfected the extreme language that dehumanizes immigrants. At a rally in Florida last month, Trump was bemoaning migrants’ legal protections when someone in the audience suggested they should be shot. The president laughed and made a joke.

Through overcrowding and dehumanization, concentration camps became self-fulfilling prophecies. The culture of abuse leads to frustration and violence, thus “justifying” their incarceration after the fact. Other citizens become desensitized to the dehumanization of a group of people and thus implicitly give approval for concentration camps by our lack of pushback.

Do you see it?

It’s happening now.

Don’t look away.

I had a surprisingly strong reaction to Marisha’s inclusion of “I Am Here,” on her Beau playlist, so naturally I felt compelled to write a thousand words about it.

I open up my heart You can love me or not There’s no such thing as sin Let it all come right in

Marisha chose this song as Beau’s tribute and remembrance of Molly, and these opening lines certainly reflect something of Molly’s general philosophy. As Taliesin has said, “There’s a way of both not giving a fuck about what people think, but giving a fuck about people.” Molly was always open with his affection, and generous with it. Beau, in contrast, closed herself off from the world as a coping mechanism. She realized just a little too late how much she actually appreciated Molly’s openness. We tend to focus on Beau’s resolve to “leave places better than she found them,” after Molly’s death, but I think her increased vulnerability, and willingness to be emotionally supportive (even when she hides it behind bravado) in recent episodes has also been a result of a shift in perspective prompted by Molly’s death.

I wanna make some mistakes, I wanna sleep in the mud

We know from things both Marisha and Beau have said that Beau has internalized the idea that she’s a “fuck up.” The desire to “make some mistakes,” is probably fraught for Beau. It’s one way you could characterize her criminal past and her general rebelling against her father. But there’s also a part of her that’s always just a little bit terrified that she’s going to prove everyone’s worst suspicions about her correct. I think she wants the freedom to be able to fuck up sometimes without it meaning that she is a fuck up. That’s something that’s come up a few times in smaller moments (Twiggy: I don’t really make the best decisions, Beau: I can relate; “Oh no! My actions affect other people!” from episode 45). Beau has been working hard to “leave every place better than she found it,” but she’s also been better at cutting herself some slack, and leaving herself room to make mistakes and learn in the process (“Having one transformative experience doesn’t mean you’re going to be better overnight. Being better is something you have to work at, I guess,” from ep 36). She doesn’t generally excoriate herself when she makes a mistake, but she’ll acknowledge it and try to move forward from there. This has actually been true since before episode 26/7. Her whole “learning to be polite” thing with Fjord carried across several episodes, and included her 1) willingly deciding she needed to apologize to Caleb (even though Fjord didn’t really think she needed to), and 2) knowing she would need help in the execution, and then asking for it. And while Beau’s general demeanor hasn’t changed, it’s so apparent how much those “lessons,” did really help with Beau’s ability to interact with people. (I’m still not over the fact that Beau apologized roughly five times in episode 45, and all of them were genuine.)

I wanna swim in the flood, I wanna fuck til I’m done I like whiskey on ice, I like sun in my eyes 

These lines reflect something of both Molly’s and Beau’s approaches to life. Beau once told Jester and Caleb that all she wants to do is “make a ton of money and drink a lot of booze, “ (ep 11). But where Molly’s hedonism was in some part due to a “life is short,” mentality, Beau’s pursuit of happiness and simple pleasures has something of a desperate edge to it. (As Marisha puts it: “She has never had an extended moment of happiness her whole life, and she’s still searching for it.”)

It’s also worth noting here that one of the ways Beau chose to honor Molly’s memory was to have a lot of sex. Learning how to “open up [her] heart,” in order to truly appreciating the joy of living in the world is just as important a thing for Beau to be striving for as her dedication to leaving places better than she found them. While it’s true that the two times Beau has (canonically) had sex didn’t really involve emotional connection (debatable in regards to Keg, though), I think they still represented her trying to break down some of her walls. Would Beau have felt compelled enough to proposition Keg if Molly hadn’t passed? I don’t think there’s a way to know the answer to that question, but it certainly seemed to factor into her decision in the moment.

I wanna burn it all down, so let’s start a fire I wanna be lost, so lost that I’m found Naked and laughing with my blood on the ground

Much as Beau claims to have no real goals or motivations, she’s clearly ready to fuck shit up and tear shit down when presented the opportunity. She has an almost knee-jerk opposition to authority in any and all forms (except maybe Fjord’s captaining). It’s one of the things that draws her to Dairon and the Expositors. I think it’s part of what motivated her to help the Knights of Requital (even if she was also significantly motivated by money), and it’s what made her such a terrifying (if somewhat unexpected) adversary to Avantika. Just because Beau is trying to commit herself to putting good into the world doesn’t mean it’s not going to come with a fair amount of chaos and destruction (e.g. freeing the Marid).

I am here, I am here I’ve already seen the bottom, so there’s nothing to fear I know that I’ll be ready when the devil is near I am here, I am here All of this wrong, but I’m still right here

I love that the song Marisha chose for Beau’s memory of Molly is so much about being present in the face of tragedy. “I am here,” can mean so many things. It can be a declaration of presence, or of defiance and resolve (“all of the this wrong, but I’m still right here”). For Beau, there may even be some survivor’s guilt mixed in. She’s still “here” when Molly isn’t, because he was trying to protect her. What are the chances even a small part of her believes she doesn’t deserve to be here?

Regardless, one thing remains: the worst has happened, but Beauregard is made of tenacity. Murder and kidnap her friends and she’ll all but kill you with her bare hands. Beau may not be caring or soft in traditional ways, but she’s fiercely protective of her friends and committed to keeping them safe.

I don’t have the answers but the question is clear Let me ask you Where does everybody go when they go? 

In Marisha’s write-up for this song, she writes, “[this was Beau’s] first real lesson that in this world and in this life that they’re living, if you hold onto something that you want to say to someone, you might lose the opportunity forever, at any moment.” This leads me to believe that this is the first time Beau has really had to grapple with the death of someone close to her. Even if Beau intellectually understands what death “is,” actually wrestling with the knowledge that someone is just gone is a lot to process. I’m honestly not sure whether this would be easier or harder to grapple with in a world where there’s proof of gods and an afterlife. I would imagine that people still wonder “where do you go when you die,” and I don’t think those answers would feel any clearer even if they factually exist.

May the light be upon me May I feel in my bones that I am enough I can make anywhere home

“My I feel in my bones that I am enough,” is one of the lines that prompted me to write this post to begin with. I kept wanting to pick a favorite bit of the song before realizing how well all of it fits Beau. But this line, specifically, breaks my heart precisely because we know that Beau doesn’t think she’s enough. In fact, she often seems to be afraid of the very prospect–she feels compelled to couch her good intentions and kind gestures in self-effacing bravado and deprecation. She so desperately wants to be “enough,” but is so used to being too much, or too abrasive for others that she has a tendency to put up walls to mask how much she seeks validation. The Mighty Nein–and Fjord and Jester in particular–were the first people to see past that and accept it. Fjord and Jester are also particularly good at seeing past her tough exterior in her more genuine moments (e.g. Fjord recognizing when Beau’s actually being nice, even when it comes across as sarcastic; or Jester understanding what Beau is offering when she tries to downplay her ability to be a ‘best friend,’ in episode 46). Of the Mighty Nein, Beau has the fewest emotional ties to a given “home,” (with the possible exception of Fjord), and has clearly decided that the Mighty Nein–wherever they are, and wherever they might go–are her home.

I can think of one thousand places much worse than this

And who wants to bet that even in their scariest moments, everything she’s encountered with the Mighty Nein is still vastly better than where she started out?

Refugees Welcome

on a post asking terfs their age and sexuality it’s clear that being a terf is not a “lesbian” thing. lesbians esp trans lesbians have pointed out over and over claiming “terfness” as a lesbian component is not only just accepting terf rhetoric n isolating trans women from their lesbianism but it’s also blatantly incorrect…? the other day i saw a trans man who identified as a terf. do not let these ppl get a pass bc ur lesbophobia allows them to slip under the radar. these ppl are still spreading harmful ideologies and will continue to do so if u do not acknowledge their existence