why are people even fucking with gatcha games the wikipedia random article button is $0 and i just rolled a 10th century byzantine encyclopedia on my 17th try
leftists on twitter are so mad at this guy for pointing out something that is fundamental to economic organization under modern imperialism lol. imperialist powers take over other nations economies, transform them to be primarily focused on key commodities for export and destroy the rest of their markets for other goods so they depend on selling these specific few commodities to the rest of the world. do you think that under a socialist government people in these countries would want to continue economies based on export of one thing or reorganize their economy to be more self sufficient and actually serve the people directly involved in it. everyone loves to point out stuff like the CIAās involvement in the coup in guatemala but lose their shit if you point out the implications in their daily american life
Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
I’ve been putting this off for too long; it’s time to be honest on this website, and that means being fun and slutty and shit. Interact with me however makes you happy :3
Hmm. Alarming trend in mass incarceration in Central America.
Also: Very disingenuous wordplay here.
Where do we begin?
ā Very disingenuous for multiple outlets to run with āthe Westā. Though this initial AP article does specify that this refers to the Western Hemisphere, the choice to run headlines with āWestā kinda implies that there are no other island prisons in āThe Westā (as in the European Union, the United States, Australia, etc.).
ā One of the most infamous incarceration schemes on the planet is Australiaās āPacific Solution,ā a āsolutionā to refugee migration centered on the imprisonment of asylum seekers on island prisons, including the infamous prisons at Nauru and Manus, both opened initially in 2001, and re-fortified after 2012. (Nauru is extremely isolated, in the South Pacific, 3000 kilometers away from the Australian coast; the Manus detention centre is far away off the northeast coast of Papua.) Since 2012, over 3,125 people have been sent to Nauru while over 4,180 people have been sent to Manus. (The ālast refugee held on the Pacific island of Nauru under Australiaās offshore detention policyā was āevacuatedā to mainland Australia only on 24 June 2023, not even a month prior to this headline.)
ā Obviously the EU incarcerates refugees on Mediterranean islands, notoriously at Moria on Lesbos, whose international reputation as the home of Sappho has been supplanted by its reputation as a de facto prison for asylum seekers. In October 2015, over 10,000 people landed on Lesbos in just one day. In 2017, the island averaged 2,500 arrivals per month. By 2019, humanitarian investigations showed that over 10,000 people were being held in a facility with a maximum capacity of 3,000. In 2020, fires left over 12,000 refugees on the island without shelter. By December 2021, Doctors Without Borders raised alarm that over 2,200 refugees were living in ādireā conditions on the island. As of early 2023, Lesbos (along with Kos, Leros, Chios, and Samos) is hosting over 4,500 people who are stuck in āreception and identification centers.ā
ā And in the Western Hemisphere? The US prison at Guantanomo, also on the coast of an island in this same sea.
ā One of the most notorious island prisons was the early twentieth century French penal colony on the periphery of the Caribbean region at Guiana (run by a France, a āWesternā power, in the Western Hemisphere), known internationally as āDevilās Island.ā
ā The federal government says the prison will be built āin harmony with nature.ā
ā A prison ā¦ in harmony with nature.
ā An island prison in the Caribbean, a region fundamentally and intimately connected to centuries of imprisonment, plantations, Indigenous genocide, antiBlackness, racial castes, and chattel slavery, all achieved and enforced through the bounded, isolated geographic containment structure allowed by islands.
ā And this is extra-worrying, because it seems itās a regional trend, evidently for Honduras, El Salvador, and Colombia.
ā Merely a few days before this headline about Honduras, international outlets were profiling Hondurasās direct neighbor, El Salvador, with headlines like āInside El Salvadorās new āmega prisonāā (Al Jazeera) and, within the past couple months, headlines like āPrisoners are being tortured to death in El Salvadorās prisonsā (VICE News).
ā From less than a week before this AP headline, we have BBC: āEl Salvadorās secretive mega-jail.ā
ā Donāt forget nearby Tapachulaās detention of asylum seekers.
Still discussing implementation of literal island prisons despite our collective familiarity with carceral archipelagoes.
In about one yearās time between 2022 and 2023, El Salvador arrested over 68,000 (68 thousand) people (of whom 63,000 remain incarcerated). Bring up Guantanamo and Iād imagine that apologists, fans of punishment, managing editors, etc., might claim āsemanticsā and argue about technical definitions of ācolonyā; or how imprisonment of asylum seekers takes place in a ādetention centreā rather than a āprisonā; or the specificity of āisland prison colonyā. But like:
