Faye Dreams

In short, the government attacks journalists and prevents them from doing their job.

Since the beginning of the protests in Belarus, the police was not shy in arresting the press and accusing them of reporting “false news” (remind you of someone?) and encouraging the protests. Together with the internet shutdown, I assume the idea is to deprive people both in Belarus and over the world of the truthful information and leave access only to the “approved channels”. Here’s how this happened:

1. The government blocked access to the independent media websites. Unless we use vpn, we can only check two independent news outlets and any day they might get blocked as well. Some printed media can’t make new issues anymore, because they decided to cover the protests. 

2. In Belarus, there are only two TV news channels, both are government-owned. Naturally, they were forbidden from reporting on anything that might criticise the current regime. People working there went on strike because of that, and many were fired. To keep those channels going, journalists from Russia were invited. So now, Russia gets to report news for many Belarusians. The same Russia that supports Lukashenko and probably wants Belarus to become part of Russia.

3. A few days ago, the police rounded up all the journalists covering the protests and held them overnight.They made a list of those people doing their job, and the following day, revoked their accreditation to work in Belarus. This means that such media channels as BBC, Reuters, Associated Press, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Deutsche Welle and others can no longer legally provide news on what is happening. The foreign journalist were deported from the country.

From now on, foreign news channels have to rely on the information of the remaining accredited media outlets. By now, they are mostly Russian ones, that are not afraid of using propaganda and painting Belarusians in the negative light. And, of course, the government-owned media. 

I am not sure, what foreign news channels are saying about us, obviously every country has their own spin. And as far as I understand from the official responses, the world is supportive of our cause, But if you want to read independent news on Belarus and the protests, directly from the Belarusian perspective, I suggest Belarusfeed . They translate the news from TUT.BY,  the most popular independent outlet.

Who are the Uighurs?

The Uighurs are mostly Muslims, and number about 11 million in western China’s Xinjiang region. They see themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations, and their language is similar to Turkish.

But in recent decades, there’s been a mass migration of Han Chinese (China’s ethnic majority) to Xinjiang, and the Uighurs feel their culture and livelihoods are under threat.

Nowhere in the world, not even in North Korea, is the population monitored as strictly as it is in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.  Oppression has been in place for years, but has worsened massively in recent months.

- Uighurs can no longer openly practice Islam

- Men are not allowed to wear beards. Exception only for old people

- They can no longer learn their native language at school

- They cannot move freely around the country and cannot leave it

- All mosques have been turned into shops and office centers

Beijing has also turned Xinjiang into a security state that is extreme even by China’s standards, being a police state itself. The provincial government has recruited over 90,000 police officers in the last two years alone - twice as many as it recruited in the previous seven years. 

At the same time, Beijing is equipping the far-western region with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, with cameras illuminating every street all over the region, from the capital Urumqi to the most remote mountain village. Iris scanners and WiFi sniffers are in use in stations, airports and at the ubiquitous checkpoints - tools and programs that allow data traffic from wireless networks to be monitored.

Checkpoints are installed in every district of the city. In simple terms, you can not get from one area of the city to another without passing the checkpoint and the police.

The data is then collated by an “integrated joint operations platform” that also stores further data on the populace – from consumer habits to banking activity, health status and indeed the DNA profile of every single inhabitant of Xinjiang.

Anyone with a potentially suspicious data trail can be detained. The government has built up a grid of hundreds of re-education camps. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into them in recent months.

“Qu xuexi,” meaning to go or be sent to study, is one of the most common expressions in Xinjiang these days. It is a euphemism for having been taken away and not having been seen or heard from since. The “schools” are re-education centers in which the detainees are being forced to take courses in Chinese and patriotism, without any indictment, due process or a fair hearing.

Xinjiang, one of the most remote and backward regions in booming China, has become a real-life dystopia. It provides a glimpse of what an authoritarian regime armed with 21st century technology is capable of.

Uighurs are very intimidated and refuse to talk to the press, even if they miraculously escaped the country. 

What’s happening in China is terrible. Maybe some people finally realize that the concentration camps are the reality of our time. There are concentration camps in America too. Don’t forget that. 

source 

If you’d rather listen to a basic outline of the problem, here’s a very well done conversation piece from Chris Hayes’s podcast, Why is This Happening.

I live in a state where you “have to” report anyone you suspect of being undocumented (that wonderful hellhole of Arizona). Now in practice this law has fallen far short, thank goodness. But if you live in such a place and they start enforcing it, here is how you get around it:

Assume everyone who doesn’t speak English is visiting.

Never ask about their job, because if they tell you they work here then you know they’re not visiting. You see them a lot for several weeks or months? Hm. Someone in the family must be ill. That’s terribly tough. They always dress in old, ratty laborers’ clothes? I feel you, my dude, I can’t afford new clothes either, and my dad has the fashion sense of an aardvark, so sometimes it’s not even about “affording” them. They say they’ve been here for years? You must have misunderstood. Spanish isn’t your first language, after all. First and last name? It never came up, or you don’t recall–you meet a lot of people.

Don’t do more than is expressly asked of you, and do what you are asked with such an intense attention to protocol that not asking you at all becomes more effective than even bothering.

In this case:

“Have you seen an illegal immigrant?”

“Could you describe an illegal immigrant, officer?”

*officer describes a person who is in the country without appropriate paperwork, or who has crossed the border illegally*

“No, sir, I haven’t seen any illegal immigrant.”

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I may be the actual only human being on Tumblr with a post this popular that I not only don’t regret making, but am actually HAPPY whenever I notice a surge in its circulation. 

I never intended this to gain any traction at all (you’ll notice there’s no sources or anything–this was a personal ramble, prompted in good humor by a friend after I jokingly said that I wished someone would give me an excuse to cry about Carpathia on Tumblr so I could get it out of my system.) I literally expected to get, like, maybe 20 likes and a reblog, from friends, indulging me in my nonsense.

It just….means a lot to me that it’s touched so many people. I see a lot of tags to the effect of “HOW DARE YOU HURT ME LIKE THIS AND MAKE ME CRY ABOUT A BOAT” that are often really funny, but overwhelmingly the tags on this post are from people saving it for a rainy day, or remarking in a sort of quiet awe that they never even really thought about her role in the story–and God knows I never did, I learned it by complete accident much as most of the people who’ve found this post. 

And so many of you guys are taking strength and reassurance from the reminder not only that people are capable of amazing things together, but simply that kindness matters and that a simple, tiny act of compassion is never wasted. I’m just really glad to have been able to do that for some folks.

If I can just add one personal note. I need to emphasize something I only touched on in the original post.

I need to emphasize that Carpathia failed.

A lot of the tags and comments have a tinge of…despair, or guilt, or wistfulness about things like this happening so rarely. Or inadequacy, or just being overwhelmed or unhappy about not being in a position to step up in a comparable way. And I want to gently bring up the fact that this is still the sinking of the Titanic. 

They did not get there in time. They did not save the ship. It can be argued that they may not even have saved a single life; we have no way of knowing. This was still a horrific maritime disaster mired in arrogance and incompetence and a lack of care.

If the response to this story shows anything, it shows this: It matters that they tried. 

Even though they got there too late, even though the ship still sank. It matters that they tried. The difference between making the best reasonable speed after confirming the seriousness of the situation, and the miracle they pulled off–it matters. It makes all the difference. Even if it made no difference at all. Not one of you read this and concluded that I was stupid for caring so much when the Titanic still sank and all those people still died.

You don’t have to fix the world. You’ll likely be cold and sick and miserable and testy and scared, and unprepared, and in over your head, and entirely too small to be of any real use. It feels stupid, passing out blankets and coffee in the middle of an ice field knowing what just happened. It’s hard to feel anything but useless when all you can do is tap a wireless transmitter and promise help that you know will come too late.

no one will face any prison time for these deaths. PG&E paid a fine of 3.5 million dollars for 84 victims, which means that in the state of California, corporations can burn a human being to death for the low, low price of $42,000 per person.

As you may know, the word ‘Sioux’ is considered to be a slur amongst members of the Oceti Sakowin. It is not our word for ourselves, but rather a name given to us by another nation and perpetuated by the Europeans / Euro-Americans.

You also may have noticed that our official tribe names often contain the word ‘Sioux’ (‘Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe’ for example.) The reason for this is entirely legal. When our treaties were drafted, they were written as an agreement between the US Government and the ‘Sioux Nation.’ For this reason, we cannot fully abandon the name. However, when we’ve had opportunities, we’ve dropped the name in places we can (’Oglala Lakota County,’ for example, a name chosen by the rezidents.)

Simply put, members of the Oceti Sakowin generally don’t refer to themselves as ‘Sioux’ and, if we can’t change it legally, at least we can continue to assert our identity on our terms. So, if you choose to respect that, here’s a quick Oceti Sakowin education guide:

Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires) 

Oceti Sakowin (encompasses all language dialects) is the simplest and broadest replacement for ‘Sioux.’ You can use this term if you aren’t aware of the specific language group to which ‘Sioux’ refers. Within the Oceti Sakowin are three main groups, which are further divided into seven subgroups:

Isanti Oyate (Santee — Dakota Dialect)

Ble Wakantunwan (Mdewakanton*) - Spirit Lake

Wahpetunwan (Wahpeton) - Leaf Village

Wahpe Kute Tunwan (Wahpekute) - Leaf Archers

Sinsin Tunwan (Sisseton) - Swamp Village

Wiciyela Oyate (Yankton/Yanktonais — Dakota Dialect ; commonly mislabeled as Nakota* Dialect)

Ihanktunwan - End of Horn Village

Ihanktunwanna - Little End of Horn Village

Tinte Oyate (Tetons — Lakota Dialect)

Tinte Ta Tunwan (Tintatunwan Oceti Sakowin) - Plains Nation

Within the Tinte Ta Tunwan / Tintatunwan Oceti Sakown (#7), there are another seven subdivisions:

Tintatunwan Oceti Sakowin - Lakota

Oglala - Scatters Their Own (Pine Ridge Indian Reservation)

Sicangu - Burnt Thighs (Rosebud Reservation, Lower Brule Reservation)

Hwohwoju (Mnikiwoju/Mniconjou) - Swamp Plant  (Cheyenne River Reservation)

Itazipcola (Itazipco) - No Bow  (Cheyenne River Reservation)

Owohe Nunpa (Oohenunpa) - Two Paunch Boiler (Cheyenne River Reservation)

Sihasapa - Black Feet (Cheyenne River Reservation, Standing Rock Reservation)

Hunkpapa - End of Horn (Standing Rock Reservation)

What the FUCK is going on?

The bill is stating ANYONE convicted of a protest-related charge (even if it is not related to actual lawbreaking like vandalism, looting or violence) will not only NOT get federal financial aid such as unemployment benefits but also will have to pay restitution to the law agency that arrested them on top of standard conviction/court fees

Indiana please vote, call, and write your local representatives to stop this from going through because the next step is a law agency attacking a peaceful protest for no reason other than anyone who defends themselves will have to pay them money

from an eating perspective, it’s just as bad. say a middle or high schooler eats breakfast (if they even eat breakfast) at 7am, then doesn’t eat lunch until 11-12 (and lunch is often inadequate), then has after-school activities, etc. and may not get home until late afternoon, or eat dinner until evening. and kids in school are not generally allowed to snack in class or given time to snack between classes. these gaps between eating times are way too big for adolescents! they need a lot of food–more than adults–to support the growth process, just as they need more sleep.

same goes for if you see anything promoting Mormonism or Scientology, although I haven’t seen materials for those things personally, I’m sure they exist

If you are invited to a Christian group that “doesn’t have a name”, something that holds meeting for outsiders in rec centers, “special meetings”- that’s a cult that is know to members only as “The Truth”, but is on Wikipedia as “two by twos”. Please reach out to me if you or anyone you love has been contacted by this group.

Jorge Gonzalez, suffered a broken neck, and a compressed spine at the hands of 3 sheriff deputies in Texas. He couldn’t even hold his head up for this mugshot…so they had to hold it up for him. They actually thought the mugshot was more important than a hospital visit.

After a deputy tripped him he hit his face hard and went unconscious. They tased him couple of times “to wake him up”.

He was left paralyzed neck down, went through a series of surgeries, and was in ICU on the ventilator for over a month after the arrest.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/justice-for-jorge-help-our-family-find-justice