#weaponized politeness

[odinsblog]

The U.N. Human rights Council has found Israel is deliberately responsible for the collective punishment of all Palestinians including noncombatant men, (pregnant) women and children; gender targeted violence; torture; using starvation as a weapon of war; and the intentional extermination of Palestinians living in Gaza.

[decolonize-the-everything]

Why are they mining so much right now?

Cobalt has become the center of a major upsurge in mining in Congo, and the rapid acceleration of cobalt extraction in the region since 2013 has brought hundreds of thousands of people into intimate contact with a powerful melange of toxic metals. The frantic pace of cobalt extraction in Katanga bears close resemblance to another period of rapid exploitation of Congolese mineral resources: During the last few years of World War II, the U.S. government sourced the majority of the uranium necessary to develop the first atomic weapons from a single Congolese mine, named Shinkolobwe. The largely forgotten story of those miners, and the devastating health and ecological impacts uranium production had on Congo, looms over the country now as cobalt mining accelerates to feed the renewable energy boom—with little to no protections for workers involved in the trade.

The city of Kolwezi, which is 300 km (186 miles) northwest of Lubumbashi and 180 km from the now-abandoned Shinkolobwe mine, sits on top of nearly half of the available cobalt in the world. The scope of the contemporary scramble for that metal in Katanga has totally transformed the region. Enormous open-pit mines worked by tens of thousands of miners form vast craters in the landscape and are slowly erasing the city itself.

[...]Much of the cobalt in Congo is mined by hand: Workers scour the surface level seams with picks, shovels, and lengths of rebar, sometimes tunneling by hand 60 feet or more into the earth in pursuit of a vein of ore. This is referred to as artisanal mining, as opposed to the industrial mining carried out by large firms. The thousands of artisanal miners who work at the edges of the formal mines run by big industrial concerns make up 90 percent of the nation’s mining workforce and produce 30 percent of its metals. Artisanal mining is not as efficient as larger-scale industrial mining, but since the miners produce good-quality ore with zero investment in tools, infrastructure, or safety, the ore they sell to buyers is as cheap as it gets. Forced and child labor in the supply chain is not uncommon here, thanks in part to a significant lack of controls and regulations on artisanal mining from the government.

[...]When later atomic research found that uranium’s unstable nucleus could be used to make a powerful bomb, the U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project began searching for a reliable source of uranium. They found it through Union Minière, which sold the United States the first 1,000 tons it needed to get the bomb effort off the ground.

The Manhattan Project sent agents of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, to Congo from 1943 to 1945 to supervise the reopening of the mine and the extraction of Shinkolobwe’s ore—and to make sure none of it fell into the hands of the Axis powers. Every piece of rock that emerged from the mine for almost two decades was purchased by the Manhattan Project and its successors in the Atomic Energy Commission, until the mine was closed by the Belgian authorities on the eve of Congolese independence in 1960. After that, the colonial mining enterprise Union Minière became the national minerals conglomerate Gécamines, which retained much of the original structure and staff.

[...]Dr. Lubaba showed me the small battery-operated Geiger counters that he uses in the field to measure radioactivity. He had begun the process of trying to find and interview the descendants of the Shinkolobwe miners, but he explained that tracing the health consequences of working in that specific mine would be difficult: Many long-established villages in the area have been demolished and cast apart as cobalt extraction has torn through the landscape. His initial inquiries suggested that at least some of the descendants of the Shinkolobwe miners had been drawn into the maelstrom of digging in the region around Kolwezi.

In her book Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, historian Gabrielle Hecht recounts the U.S. Public Health Service’s efforts to investigate the effects of uranium exposure on people who worked closely with the metal and the ore that bore it. In 1956, a team of medical researchers from the PHS paid a visit to Shinkolobwe while the mine was still producing more than half of the uranium used in America’s Cold War missile programs. Most of their questions went unanswered, however, as Shinkolobwe’s operators had few official records to share and stopped responding to communications as soon as the researchers left.

[...]“Don’t ever use that word in anybody’s presence. Not ever!” Williams quotes OSS agent Wilbur Hogue snapping at a subordinate who had said the mine’s name in a café in Congo’s capital. “There’s something in that mine that both the United States and Germany want more than anything else in the world. I don’t know what it’s for. We’re not supposed to know.”

[folklorespring]

This!

[rejectingrepublicans]

[beauty-funny-trippy]

The difference between Democrats and Republicans:

Gus Walz, at age 17, saw his Dad, Tim Walz, up on stage, ready to accept his party's nomination for vice president. Gus was so overwhelmed with emotions that he gave his father a standing ovation as he wept. Gus made no attempt to hide or hinder his great joy, pride and love he has for his father.

Democrats celebrated Gus' reaction as a wonderful expression of the close-knit family values in the Walz household. Republicans, however, chose to publicly mock and ridicule the teenager, who is a special needs kid.

Kyle Rittenhouse, at age 17, heard about a Black Lives Matter protest regarding a police shooting in Wisconsin and drove all the way from his home in Illinois with a military-style semi-automatic rifle (the kind often used in mass shootings) to confront the protesters.

As he was threatening people with his assault rifle, brave BLM protesters tried to disarm the gunman. Kyle Rittenhouse killed two unarmed men that night, and by claiming self-defense —he got away with it.

Now, Rittenhouse is a celebrated speaker at Republican events, describing him as a "hero to millions." They give him standing ovations while chanting his name.

To review: Republicans tried to humiliate a teenager with disabilities because he openly expressed the love he has for his family. But, they praise another teenager for shooting to death two unarmed people who would be alive today if Kyle had just left his f*cking assault rifle at home.

The deranged, upside-down "values" of Trump's Republican Party are not just weird, not just perverse —they're dangerous.

[iizuumi]

Enough general kn8 art, time to make everyone look at my weird little ship hello

[incorrectbatfam]

You say ACAB but work security?

Sitting in an empty building with my one day of training is not the same as going through a 6-month academy to uphold systems of oppression

[oneofthosecrazycatladies]

Reminder that the President of the United States has complete, unilateral control over America’s nuclear weapons.

Back in 1945, Harry Truman had a bunch of trigger-happy generals who weee overexcited about the new technology that was the nuclear bomb and they basically wanted to bomb everyone so Truman decided that the President, alone, should have the power to decide when to use nuclear weapons and on whom. And that hasn’t changed to this day.

Just something to keep in mind when you’re deciding who to vote for.

[gomacave]

5p yuuram bloood twww

[greencarnation]

Updates on Palestine 9/12/12 00:48 GMT

Don't stop talking about Palestine.

[zarnzarn]

(check the tags for more and also the tag for other fics in the story!)

athena, scowling as she gets bullied into marrying the people she pined over for the last 1000 years, suddenly realising something: wait a minute

odysseus: what?

athena, frozen: wait a damn minute you know what this gives me rights to do

penelope, also realising: oh fuck yes

odysseus: I don't like the sound of whatever's happening here what are you two fucking talking about?

athena, grabbing the marriage wine and tossing it back, then kissing her new wife and husband and handing penelope a spear as she picks up a mace: we'll be back shortly, you can start celebrations without us.

penelope: do u have anything that can start a fire

athena, pulling out an old contract and scanning it before throwing it over her shoulder: yes. are you scared of heights or can we fly.

penelope: fucking bring it I've waited years for this moment

zeus: where are they going

hermes, picking up the contract: they're going to... Ogygia? Oh fucking shit they're going to fucking kill Calypso- hey, hello, WAIT-

[odinsblog]

“I had a Zionist grandmother who grew up, she grew up in Poland, she was supposed to go to Israel to study. Her father had paid for her for the first year of tuition. And then in 1939, when she was in her last year of high school, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland.

She ended up for a couple of years in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland, which was how she ended up in Moscow. And by the time Germany occupied all of Poland. So then she spent the rest of her life living in Moscow.

And 45 years after the end of the war, dreaming of being able to go to Israel, but not being able to because she was now stuck in the Soviet Union. And so I think I was very infected by, infected in a non-derogatory sense, by my grandmother's dream of Israel. And I had my own dream of Israel growing up as a, as a Jewish kid who was bullied and beaten up and teased.

I just wanted to live in a country that, that was majority Jewish. I could not understand why my parents would want to go to the United States and live in another country where Jews are in the minority. My parents on the other hand just didn't want to be Jewish.

Like their only experience of being Jewish was being systematically discriminated against. They were both born during the Second World War, so they were second generation, utterly non-religious and separated from any Jewish tradition, except the tradition of being a targeted minority. So they just, they just wanted to go somewhere where they wouldn't be Jewish.

And so when I was 15, a year after we moved to the United States, I actually went to Israel planning to stay there and didn't. For a variety of reasons, but one of them was being confronted with, with what I found at the age of 15, a shockingly racist society.

So the first time I went to Israel was when I was 15, it was 1982. And then there was like an 18, 17 or 18 year gap.

And I started traveling to Israel regularly from 1999, 2000. And the first time I went back was to actually complete the research on the book about my grandmother's. So it's been a good 25 years that I've been coming back.

And I think Israel has undergone a lot of changes in that time. But no, I don't think that like the kind of Ashkenazi Sephardic racism that shocked me in 1982 has found subtler expressions. But politics of settlement have only been exacerbated.

And I still find them extremely painful to observe, especially because some of my beloved relatives are settlers.

I did visit them this last time I was in Israel, because I really wanted to see what it looked like for them.

I was compelled to go visit them because of a Facebook post that my cousin made. And just to give you an idea, I really hold these people very, very dear. But for years, I would go to Israel, Palestine and not tell them that I was there, because I kind of couldn't face them.

So it's been a number of years since I last saw them, a number of years since I went to that settlement. But my cousin had posted something on Facebook. It was a picture of her son playing the violin.

And she wrote, in one of the houses where they stayed in Gaza, there was a violin. He played for his soldiers and then put the violin back. And I found that post-heart-rending and eye-opening, the picture of him playing the violin was not from Gaza.

It was from earlier, but he had apparently told her about playing the violin in Gaza. And obviously she was worried about her son serving in Gaza and so she's posting about it. And she wants to assert that he is a good boy.

But also, entirely missing from that post and from her world view is that somebody lived in that house in Gaza. That violin belonged to somebody. Like, it was such an extraordinary example of the blindness that we were talking about a little bit earlier that I wanted to go visit them and kind of engage with that blindness more.

And I got a really good dose of blindness to the point where, and we had this incredible moment when we went walking around the settlement after Shabbat lunch. And we sort of got to this hilltop where there's a swing and there's a little free library.

And we're looking out on a Palestinian village. And I said, what are we looking at, to my cousin? And she was trying to get her bearings.

And she said, where are we looking? And she named another settlement, which was kind of, which was not on our line of sight. It was like this literal example of looking at an actual Palestinian village that she drives past every day.

And before the village was sealed off after October 7th, she used to get gas there. And she knows it exists. But somehow she, also it also doesn't enter her geography.

It is nameless.”

—Masha Gessen, the descendant of Holocaust survivors, discusses the dehumanization of Palestinians (part 2 of 3)

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Two Liberal MPs in the Toronto area have broken ranks with the Trudeau government regarding Israel’s assault on Gaza, endorsing an arms embargo on Israel until it complies with international law.

As of March 11, Israel’s attacks have killed more than 31,000 people in Gaza, including 12,300 children, according to Palestinian health officials. Another 8,000 people are believed to be buried under rubble.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military continues to impede deliveries of humanitarian aid entering the besieged enclave, and has repeatedly fired on aid trucks.

Full article

The two Liberal Party MPs who broke ranks are Beaches-East York MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and Davenport MP Julie Dzerowicz, both from the Toronto area.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[thefeastandthefast]

I'm OBSESSED with the terrifying Princess Wanning and want ALL the backstory about her time as a hostage and everything she did to survive (and possibly even thrive?) in such a situation. Please, drama, give it to me! (Do I feel fic urges coming on?)

She's over-the-top and openly, gleefully cruel and sadistic in a way that female villains don't often get to be, but the actress makes her chillingly believable. The actress Li Meng oscillates so naturally between all the minute shades of her many malevolent moods and is clearly having a ball playing her. Li Meng was great in The Bad Kids and now I know I will definitely be seeking out more of her work. Suggesting two men murder each other in front of her as a job interview is exactly the kind of unhinged psychotic creativity that I appreciate about Wanning.

[rejectingrepublicans]

[ms-hells-bells]

this bizarre politicisation of the existence of basic empathy driven fear and horror really confounds me.

when the christchurch attack happened, much of my country was significantly traumatised. i remember watching the news for hours, just crying. it was terrible. because people died. in a really horrible way. and because country kinship exists, you go 'oh, i probably knew someone who died or know someone who knew someone who died'. my roommate had friends at the mosque.

i'm not talking about the politicisation of the event in terms of how the american government used it to justify the invasion of iraq, i'm not talking about the politicisation of the event to spur racism and nationalism and xenophobia. i'm not talking about the politicisation of the event in terms of being used as an excuse to further push into a surveillance state, as per the snowden files.

i'm just talking about the mocking, minimising, and derision of what is essentially just a large group of people that witnessed something horrible and have strong feelings and memories because human beings have empathy. no amount of 'well, other people have it worse elsewhere' changes that. by that logic, no one should be scared and upset about mass shootings on the other side of the country, no oppressor group actually feels bad about oppression because 'it's not happening to you', countries that dealt well with covid shouldn't have any residual issues from seeing what other countries went through, and vicarious/collective trauma would not exist as a psychological concept.