to-the-starlit-west

[to-the-starlit-west]

huge apology to everyone who followed me for the fandoms and just got my politics.

also apology to everyone who followed for the politics and is getting fandom thirst instead.

no i will not make a separate side blog.

[to-the-starlit-west]

Still frame from WikiLeaks "Collateral Murder" video, captured moments before U.S. helicopter pilots would go on to kill civilians and journalists in Iraq in 2007 while casually joking about it. Whistleblower Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, none of the perpetrators were charged

[to-the-starlit-west]

They're not statistics. Aouni El-Dous was 12 years old. I honestly dont know what to say except that this video breaks my heart every time I see it

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I hope im not just a mutual to you, but someone who keeps putting questionable RPF on your dash

[to-the-starlit-west]

"Who Remembers the Armenians?" by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish / "Who Remembers the Palestinians?" by Armenian writer Sophia Armen

[to-the-starlit-west]

10pm: time for my daily despairing of the rightward swing in irish and european politics... i have never lived anywhere but in ireland and i speak irish but i can't even consider myself irish anymore because i'm not white. what happened?????

[to-the-starlit-west]

i just want you to know im SO brainrotted with both UK and Irish politics and your drawings are so good ong....genuinely I had to sit down for ten minutes and just stare at them 🙏 I'd tell you to become a political cartoonist but RTÉ/BBC don't deserve you

shhayhahah grma a chara ... me fucking too i heart irish politics ....

ur very kind tysm! and yeah ur completely right neither the BBC nor rté deserve my yaoi OR yuri ..... (maybe the guardian tho)

[to-the-starlit-west]

my favorite thing to do at work is sit at my desk eating a giant bowl of chopped raw vegetables and watch someone much more competent than me edit a shared document in real time

i feel like a little animal in a cage, confined yet unburdened, watching the stressed out humans go about their lives

[to-the-starlit-west]

the way some civilians talk about war is insane to me. Why are you adopting this detached ideological stance. It's not about justice or punishment when it comes to people like you and I. It would be about destruction and survival. When you hear people like this talk, they just completely erase the humanity of the people in the situation. If your response to the death and injury of thousands, if you hear about a parent holding their child who's limbs were blown off and you're just like "well was it justified?" You aren't even a human to me.

this isn't an abstract essay question, these are real people. And what kills me is, you're a civilian. You have no pull, clout or power. Why are you speaking like you're a policymaker or like you're one of the guys who'd make the "tough decisions" in a war; you're never getting in that room. you would be the one getting bombed, you would be in the rubble, you would be the one looking for scraps to feed your children. War should show you the average person is just a bag of meat to people in power, so why the fuck are you aligning yourself with people who think you're disposable. At least have some empathy?

[to-the-starlit-west]

New Labour....but like...new new labour.. 💔

[to-the-starlit-west]

keir starmer/simon harris is real and true

(copium) (wtf is wrong with me) (why is my life so uneven) (i miss simon harris being taoiseach) (meow meow)

the dialogue is.... don't even ask. if u recognise the references cool beans (gunshots)

[to-the-starlit-west]

i still think one of tumblr's darkest moments (much worse than anything i've seen before and i have been here since 2011) was when random fandom bloggers started doing confidently accusing people living through a genocide of being scammers. i think there's a lot that has happened on this website but the juxtaposition of running something so trivial as a fandom blog (i have been in fandom for a long time and triviality here is not an insult but an understanding of what makes it light) while doing something so enormously heavy and dark has me reeling

[to-the-starlit-west]

its always morally okay to make dutch people mad

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something weird is how much memory distorts reality.

I got hit as a kid and I turned out fine, maybe. saw a mother hit her 6 year old, or maybe he was a little older or younger, in the park today and i walked home crying the whole time. obviously nobody asks if I'm okay or if something's happened, I walked past my neighbours tears streaming down my face and nobody could spare a word.

you can cry at a bus stop or in the tram or in the train station, you can have your head yanked back by the hair in front of a busy main pedestrianised street, you can show up to school or work with a black eye, and you can own a passport on which for five miserable years it possesses a picture of you with faint strangulation marks on your neck, and nobody will ever notice. they will not so much as look at you.

I didn't spare a word for that kid.

it seemed so wrong, seeing how small he was. I guess his mother was sick of him. I'm rationalising it even now in my head but part of me cannot give up: how could you hurt a lottle kid like that?

it's not nice being hit. it hurts your physical self, but it also hurts you dignity. I internalised a lot of stuff as a kid. you feel bad about yourself. you start thinking about yourself as a kind of thing that gets hit. and you think that reflects badly on you, badly on your moral character.

I wonder if that little kid will remember the park. probably not. it will probably all just blur into one long sequence and he won't be able to distinguish between individual slaps or tugs or pushes, he'll just live with the fact that he l it happened. live with the fact that he's the sort of thing that that happens to. plenty of other kids don't get hurt, so maybe he'll suppose it's something to do with him.

maybe it'll be part of his identity. a kind of thing that gets hit. six, maybe seven. too young for any real transgressions.

and she didn't go easy on him either. he didn't cry out or anything silly like that. if he'd screamed I might've felt less sorry for him.

[to-the-starlit-west]

I attended a talk in the RIA about exactly this - its a vicious cycle. The more the EU cracks down on smugglers the more hazardous the routes become and the more people die.

"Those who seek to enter Europe clandestinely nearly always do so with the aid of traffickers or smugglers. Aware of the risks, and most often pooling the life savings of families to pay the traffickers' charges, they decide that the circumstances in their country of origin are so bleak that they have no option but to become part of the ‘human cargo’ smuggled into Europe. That they ‘choose’ to be dehumanised and commodified in this way, is the most glaring measure of their desperation. But this desperation is not acknowledged by politicians, who respond to the emotionally-charged media-generated hysteria over asylum by demonising the desperate as an ‘invading army’ of ‘illegal immigrants.’

It was the laws introduced by politicians throughout Europe, North America and Australia from the 1980s onwards that have set the tone for the ill-informed media debate. ... Common visa policies (that denied visas to those coming from refugee-producing countries) and carriers' liability fines (which penalised airlines and sea carriers that brought in those without papers) were introduced; airline liaison officers were installed in refugee-producing countries and readmission treaties negotiated. With the introduction of such barriers, the vast majority of asylum seekers, attempting to reach the EU, turned to human smugglers and trafficking networks. Independent research shows that now most asylum seekers need to engage the assistance of smugglers or traffickers at some point in their journey.

The detrimental impact of European policies on asylum rights was never acknowledged during the 1990s. Instead, new asylum policies were formulated within a criminological perspective which prioritised the need to combat transnational organised crime over the rights of refugees. ... In identifying trafficking and smuggling networks as the main obstacle to managed migration, their framework blurred the legal distinctions between trafficking and smuggling. For trafficking, which involves exploitation that goes on after the arrival in the country of destination, such as bonded labour or prostitution, is clearly a facet of international organised crime. But smuggling, which involves an assisted illegal border crossing with no ongoing exploitation, is not – as acknowledged by the drafters of the 1951 Geneva Convention.

The drafters of the 1951 Geneva Convention, in recognition of the human smuggling networks that had aided Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, had stipulated in Article 31 that those who used illegal methods to enter a country should not be penalised if their purpose in so doing was to seek asylum. Today, Article 31 has been totally undermined by laws which criminalise smuggling. The year 2000 was designated by the EU, the Group of 8 Industrialised Nations and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (which includes Canada and the US) as the year of the Anti-Trafficking Plan. Subsequently, the 2000 UN Convention on Transnational Crime initiated separate trafficking and smuggling protocols. The smuggling protocol makes it an international offence to assist any person in an illegal border crossing, regardless of whether he or she is a refugee in need of protection. It also states that a migrant, who engages the help of smugglers, is not a blameless victim but complicit in the criminal act of illegal migration.

By conflating trafficking networks with smuggling, by treating all those who seek the aid of traffickers or smugglers as complicit in criminal activity, the UN Convention has absolved policy-makers in the richer developed nations of any blame in the mounting toll of deaths at its borders. Blame for the deaths (when they are acknowledged at all) is placed at the door of ruthless trafficking networks, although those who seek the services of smugglers or traffickers are regarded by the UN as complicit in their own victimisation. What is not being acknowledged, is the way that immigration and asylum policies of North Africa, Australia and Europe have, since the early 1990s, created the market for traffickers and smugglers to flourish.

Each time smugglers or traffickers seek to exploit a new route, the EU attempts to seal it off. But EU policies do not work. They do not deter people from coming. People just choose more circuitous and hazardous routes. EU policy is, quite literally, funnelling people to their deaths."

Liz Fekete, "Death at the Border - Who is to Blame?" (2003)

[to-the-starlit-west]

regarding point 2 it's 200 children by the way. little kids with faces and names and mums and dads and siblings. little kids who have had their lives cut short for no reason at all. 200 children in one massacre. think about that. imagine 10 classes of primary or secondary school children, all of them murdered.

Within one week, between Tuesday March 18 and today March 24, Israel had:

1. Killed over 750 Palestinians in Gaza (x)

2. Committed the largest child massacre in its history (x)

3. Approved a "voluntary departure" plan in its cabinet (x)

4. Displaced Palestinian families in the West Bank with no prior notice from their homes (x)

5. Forcibly displaced people in Gaza under direct threat (x)

6. Its forces stood guard as its nasty settlers took over a Palestinian family's home as the family went out for iftar in Hebron (x)

7. Bombed and levelled Gaza's only remaining cancer treatment facility (x)

8. Bombed Nasser hospital, killing and injuring patients and medical staff (x)

9. Assassinated two journalists in Gaza within hours from each other (x)

10. Continued to prevent food, water, medicine and other essentials from entering besieged Gaza for the 24th day (x)

Do with this list what you will.

[to-the-starlit-west]