Devoid

megthanzag but they’re all the awkward third wheel

And, as a Jewish person, I know that 6 million very well could be murdered. This is not another Shoah, but it very well could become another. As a Jewish person, I feel we must say “never again.”

Never again.

“Never again” does not mean “this event was so uniquely horrible, it could never happen again.” It means “this event was horrible, but not unique. We have to make sure it never happens again.”

Never again.

The Uyghur death count isn’t 6 million, that is misinformation. But “never again” means we have to make sure it doesn’t become 6 million.

If you are not Jewish or Romani, do not draw comparisons to the Holocaust. All that provides is shock value and misinformation. What you can do is support Uyghur Muslims.

The link to the original post doesn’t work—here are other sources:

Source from The Silhouette

Source from Business Insider

Source from Middle East Forum

Source from India Blooms

Source #1 from Jewish News

Source #2 from Jewish News

Groups to donate to:

Charity Right’s Food for Uyghurs

Uyghur Human Rights Project

Petitions to sign:

Petition 1

Petition 2

If you have more relevant resources, please share them. Petitions are likely meaningless in contrast to the Chinese government.

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

Can’t believe Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in the 2000s

And in 2015 Emily Brontë released literary clsssic Wuthering Heights

a woman was the first known author/poet in 2300BC - Enheduanna

the first novel in recorded history was written by a woman in 1010AD - Murasaki Shikibu

the earliest example of science fiction was written by a woman in 1666 - Margaret Cavendish

horror science fiction was popularised by a teenage girl in 1818 - Mary Shelley

a Scotswoman expanded childrens’ stories from moralising tales into anarchic adventures in the mid 1800s, well before it became popular in the early 20th century - Catherine Sinclair

the masked/costumed hero archetype that inspired Batman and Zorro was created by a woman in 1905 - Baroness Emma Orczy