I Still Dont Understand Whats Going On

it's not because the world hasn't seen massacre before. it's seen genocide before, and it has seen horror before. we took measures to stop them from happening again, and what we're seeing now isn't that these measures aren't being applied—it's that these measures are being undone altogether. yes they've been undermined for as long as they've been instituted, but right now their very existence is being questioned. rather than the cursory 'we made some mistakes and we failed to save human lives' what is happening now, politically, is 'we're making no mistakes and some lives are not worth saving.' a lot of terrible things have happened over the past half-century, and it's becoming clearer that the lessons learned were not how to stop them from happening, but rather how to get away with it.

what's happening right now is that every political avenue to prevent genocide is being systemically and calmly blocked. every non-violent avenue to prevent genocide is being systemically and calmly blocked. i am saying this to those of you who are liberal, rational and concerned about democracy—what would you do differently right now? if you were invested in stopping this genocide, what would you do?

the answer is there is nothing you can do. there is literally nothing. the best solution a liberal can come up with right now is simply "i would not be in this position in the first place." and if you are a white person of the first world, you probably would not. but that's a futile answer right now, isnt it? it shows the limit of your understanding of this situation, and only reaffirms the lack of political solutions.

if you are invested in stopping this genocide with us, if you've been trying to for the past five months, then you know exactly what i'm saying. people are discovering the hard limits of empire today. they're getting a front-row seat to three genocides at once—one in the name of capitalist exploitation, one in the name of anti-blackness and proxy wars, and one in the name of settler colonialism. they are seeing the value of human life degrade and the people we pay and elect to stop that from happening just accelerate this further. what would you do if you were palestinian? what would you do if you were congolese? what would you do if you were sudanese? you would be doing exactly what people are already doing. i promise you whatever you come up with is already being done.

and it is being done to little to no avail. the progress being made is slower than rate at which hard-won human rights are regressing. people care more than ever but governments are being less beholden to their people than they have been in a long time. UN agencies are being defunded and dismantled. no recourse for congo, less aid is getting to sudan, and aid is actively killing palestinians. are you paying attention to this kind of thing? it's indicative of how disposable people are. and in the future, those people won't always be far away.

what would you do differently? what solutions are there? the problems we have right now can only be solved politically at a rate slower than people are dying. this makes the political solutions a hindrance rather than a help. what should've been a path to stopping genocide becomes complicity in genocide. red tape around shrouds.

The hyena biologist that arranged for Disney animators to come sketch captive  hyenas for The Lion King film (Laurence Frank) was so incensed when the animals were depicted as villains in the movie that he later included boycotting the film on a list of ways the average person could help hyena conservation.

Though it’s commonly known that Charles Darwin’s distaste for parasitic wasps played a role in his development of evolution theory (since he felt no loving God would create animals with such a disturbing life cycle), the biologists who study these wasps find it an unfair characterization. When they were tasked with coming up with a common name for the family of parasitic wasps (Ichneumonidae) that old Charles so disliked, they proposed the name “Darwin Wasps” to spite the famous naturalist who had insulted their beloved family of insects.

Parasitologist Tommy Leung was so frustrated with the way people write about parasites to evoke horror and gore that he started writing a Parasite of the Day blog, that specifically avoids inflammatory or unsettling language to describe them. He also illustrates different species in colorful anime art on Twitter in a series called Parasite Monster Girls—which he calls his “love letter to parasites.”