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afeelgoodblog · 1 year

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The Best News of Last Week - June 20, 2023

🐕 - Meet Sheep Farm's Newest Employee: Collie Hired After Ejection from Car!

1. Border Collie ejected from car during Sunday crash found on sheep farm, herding sheep

Tilly, the 2-year-old Border Collie who was ejected from a car Sunday during a crash, has been found. He was found on a sheep farm, where he had apparently taken up the role of sheep herder.

According to Tilly's owner, he has lost some weight since Sunday's crash and is now drinking lots of water but is otherwise healthy.

2. After 17-Year Absence, White Rhinos Return to the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) recently welcomed the reintroduction of 16 southern white rhinoceroses to Garamba National Park, according to officials. The last wild northern white rhino was poached there in 2006.

The white rhinos were transported to Garamba, which lies in the northeastern part of the country, from a South African private reserve. In the late 19th century, the southern white rhino subspecies was believed to be extinct due to poaching until a population of fewer than 100 was discovered in South Africa in 1895, according to WWF.

3. UK to wipe women’s historic convictions for homosexuality

Women with convictions for some same-sex activity in the United Kingdom can apply for a pardon for the first time, the Home Office has announced.

The Home Office is widening its scheme to wipe historic convictions for homosexual activity more than a decade after the government allowed applications for same-sex activity offences to be disregarded.

It means anyone can apply for a pardon if they have been convicted or cautioned for any same-sex activity offences that have been repealed or abolished.

4. Study shows human tendency to help others is universal

A new study on the human capacity for cooperation suggests that, deep down, people of diverse cultures are more similar than you might expect. The study, published in Scientific Reports, shows that from the towns of England, Italy, Poland, and Russia to the villages of rural Ecuador, Ghana, Laos, and Aboriginal Australia, at the micro scale of our daily interaction, people everywhere tend to help others when needed.

5. In a First, Wind and Solar Generated More Power Than Coal in U.S.

Wind and solar generated more electricity than coal through May, an E&E News review of federal data shows, marking the first time renewables have outpaced the former king of American power over a five-month period.

The milestone illustrates the ongoing transformation of the U.S. power sector as the nation races to install cleaner forms of energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

6. Iceland becomes latest country to ban conversion therapy

Lawmakers in Iceland on June 9 approved a bill that will ban so-called conversion therapy in the country.

Media reports note 53 members of the Icelandic Parliament voted for the measure, while three MPs abstained. Hanna Katrín Friðriksson, an MP who is a member of the Liberal Reform Party, introduced the bill.

7. The temple feeding 100,000 people a day

Amritsar, the north Indian city known for its Golden Temple and delicious cuisine, is also renowned for its spirit of generosity and selfless service. The city, founded by a Sikh guru, embodies the Sikh tradition of seva, performing voluntary acts of service without expecting anything in return.

This spirit of giving extends beyond the temple walls, as the Sikh community has shown immense compassion during crises, such as delivering oxygen cylinders during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the heart of Amritsar's generosity is the Golden Temple's langar, the world's largest free communal kitchen, serving 100,000 people daily without discrimination. Despite a history marred by tragic events, Amritsar continues to radiate kindness, love, and generosity.

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That's it for this week :)

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#best news of last week

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qqueenofhades · 1 month

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Hoping you can explain this because you’re smart but why in the world are the same people who scream about a labor shortage worried about the border and immigration? Isn’t more people coming to our country a good thing if we train them properly to fill vacant positions (a lot of which are service jobs anyway)?

Alas, you are forgetting what is quite possibly the chief shibboleth of Western white supremacy/far-right nationalism: that all people from other countries, especially *gasp* the brown ones, are invaders, murderers, job-stealers, polluters of the (white) body politic, etc, and that under no circumstances should they be invited or allowed to stay. This isn't just an American thing; witness the Tories in the UK salivating over the idea of torturing migrants, trying to shut down any legal migration routes even with the employment black hole caused by Brexit, steadfastly denying that their workforce problems have anything to do with Brexit, steadfastly denying that they need to loosen immigration rules, etc. This is also the case with the European right/far right, the Australian far right, and anywhere else in the world that has historically been built on systems of white colonization, white supremacy, and other racial and legal scaffolds of privilege and exclusion. The white people who come to a country and settle it are bringing "civilization" and therefore should be welcomed and encouraged, but the non-white people who already lived there are "savages" and need to be exterminated for the good of the "master race." If they try to come back to the (white) nation state after their homelands were colonized, moreover, they are "invaders" who just want to "soak up the money of hard-working citizens" and etc etc.

The core fascist hatred of immigrants is also why Trump is directly echoing Hitler's anti-immigrant rhetoric with his "poisoning the blood of America" screeds, his promise to round up and deport migrants en masse, and otherwise be as massive of a dick as possible. The fact that there's no economic benefit and indeed a lot of economic pain is entirely beside the point. Trump and his deranged followers like the cruelty and the idea of torturing brown people for daring to come to "their" (white) America, and think that if they can be outrageously monstrous enough, this will finally deter all the other ones from coming. It won't, and no globalized economy will run without immigrants, but again, this isn't the point. Reality or pragmatic calculations have nothing to do with it. It's only about what can cause the maximum amount of cruelty and chaos to everyone who doesn't wholeheartedly worship and fit the (white) fascist model. That's why the Republicans yelled about wanting a border bill before they'd fund Ukraine; the Democrats obligingly gave them one with some of the toughest restrictions in years, and the Republicans yelled and threw it away because Dear Leader Trump told them to trash it. In some sense this is a good thing, because it meant that Ukraine got funded without being beholden to performative partisan cruelty at the border, but it also shows that they don't actually care about any of this. They have bluntly stated in so many words that they want a manufactured crisis at the border so Trump will have it as a campaign issue. Then he can take office and implement all his terrible concentration camps and all the other genocidal fascist bullshit of Project 2025 (bUt bIdEn iZ thE wOrsE oPtiOn!!!!!)

So: yeah. There's no point looking for any actual consistency or logic in the modern far right, because that is so far from the actual aim. No matter if migrants are essential, no matter if Americans literally won't take many of the jobs they do, etc. I live in a big city that has had a ton of migrants coming here and have read many, many news articles about how all they want to do is get a work permit, make their own money, learn English, and integrate into American culture; they are often far more positive about the prospects of America than actual Americans. But because the entire project of a (white) fascist ethnostate as advocated by Trump and co. in America, the Tories/Reform in the UK, and the far-right European parties, Russia, and other places (this is all connected worldwide -- again, it's not limited to one country or region), rests on demonizing (brown) immigrants as subhuman scroungers who come to rape, murder, steal jobs, and otherwise threaten (white) law-abiding citizens, that will always win out above every single other consideration.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts #cw white supremacy #history #history of racism

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obsessioncollector · 30 days

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"The past has a way of repeating itself, just as the future has a way of not turning out as expected. On May 26, 1924, lawmakers tried to curb immigration—and ensure that the United States would be a white, Protestant country—by passing the Johnson-Reed Act. Also known as the Immigration Act of 1924, this legislation established a national origins quota system, which severely restricted migrants from eastern and southern Europe and almost entirely barred 'aliens ineligible for citizenship' from Asia and the Middle East. Building on the Chinese Exclusion and Asiatic Barred Zone Acts, the Johnson-Reed Act was the legislative achievement of a eugenics movement that sought to racially engineer the US populace by excluding Asians, as well as 'inconclusively white' Catholic and Jewish migrants.

"Upon signing the bill, President Calvin Coolidge declared, 'America must be kept American.' He won the approval of the Ku Klux Klan and the admiration of Adolf Hitler. Weeks later, Congress authorized the creation of the US Border Patrol to enforce the Johnson-Reed Act’s imperatives. Taken together, the creation of the quota system and the Border Patrol ushered in the most restrictive era of US immigration history: our own."

#history #politics #migration #policing

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probablyasocialecologist · 5 months

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The 370-page border bill that Democrats signed off on reads like a GOP wish list. Perhaps that’s because Republicans helped write the bill (though many of them promptly turned around and helped tank it after Donald Trump announced his opposition). Among its provisions: $8 billion in emergency funding for ICE, including $3 billion to increase detentions; a mechanism to “shut down” the border if a certain number of people cross; $7 billion in emergency funding for Customs and Border Protection; and a continuation of Trump’s border wall. A few progressive-sounding add-ons aside, like freeing up a limited number of new visas and hiring some more lawyers, the legislation is a complete concession to the worst aspects of Trumpism that Biden and Democrats purportedly ran against in 2020. How do Democrats justify this lurch toward increased brutality at the border? Some appear to view it as a clever maneuver to beat the GOP at their own game. By adopting Republican framing and policy on immigration, and still getting rebuffed, this thinking goes, Democrats will show voters that Trump-driven hysteria is to blame for the supposed “crisis” at the border. It’s a confounding and amoral “gotcha” strategy, in which people seeking to move across the border in pursuit of safety, work, and a new home amount to little more than a mechanism for media narrative point-scoring.

[...]

Do Democrats now agree with the Republican party on immigration, ideologically? Their outward messaging appears to accept the premise that this hard-right bill will “fix the border” (whatever this means), so it seems they do. Top Democratic senators are proudly boosting an endorsement of the bill by the Border Patrol union, a far-right union with a history of promoting white nationalism and avidly backing Trump. MSNBC personality Al Sharpton, much to the right-wing media’s gratification, said in an interview with Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) Tuesday that “we’re looking every day at the invasion of migrants”—positively Trumpian rhetoric. This seems like quite a pivot after Democratic party messaging ran in 2020 on criticizing Trump’s border policies and rhetoric as akin to Nazism. If so, do the Democrats now owe the GOP an apology? Or, do Democrats not really think these far-right policies are good, but are simply “calling Republicans’ bluff” to prove some broader meta-point? And if so, isn’t it quite a gamble to risk the immigration status of millions and stoke nativist fears to get some cutesy hypocrisy gotcha over on the Republicans? If Democrats can, seemingly overnight, radically alter their position on immigration from one that at least pretended to pay lip service to the humanity of those seeking a better life in the US to nonstop tough-guy posturing about “harsh,” “strict,” “tough” “border security,” then what message does this send to other vulnerable groups?

#democrats #republicans #immigration #borders #ICE #us mexico border

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communistkenobi · 2 months

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If, as Isaac West observes, use of the public bathroom is “one of the most, if not the most, quotidian practices of citizenship,” then this chapter argues that surveillance criminalizing public bathroom use is one element of a larger effort to secure citizenship and spatial belonging through the apprehension of physical difference. [...]

Writing about the concept of civilization in the late nineteenth-century United States, Gail Bederman describes it as an “explicitly racial concept” that “denoted a precise stage in human racial evolution”: one that had evolved past primitive or barbaric characteristics. Drawing on Darwinism, this logic rationalized white supremacy through claims that people of color simply had not developed in the same ways or at the same rate as white people, situating civilization itself as a racial characteristic and producing and solidifying distinct racial categories. Bederman notes that gender was crucial in distinguishing civilized societies from the less advanced, with the former identified in part by clear binary gender divisions. [...] Moreover, in the era of formal Jim Crow, while bathrooms marked for white people were typically separated into men’s and women’s spaces, those labeled “colored” were often unmarked by gender at all, a practice that aligns with civilizational discourse. [...]

Yet citizenship status and gender status cannot be pulled apart [...]: just as the previous two chapters of this book traced specific aspects of the Department of Homeland Security that produce and rely on a gendered citizenship, we might consider how campaigns for neighborhood safety and family values regularly invoke a kind of good citizenship that is determined in part through gender attributes. [...]

We need only consider the emphasis on birth certificates to understand the extent to which anxieties about citizenship undergird these bathroom scenes, since those documents mark not only state-approved sex designation, but also legal citizen status. In the most formal sense, birth certificates purportedly confirm citizenship and thus one’s legal belonging to the nation-state. At the same time, they can serve as evidence of citizenship in a more informal or cultural sense: if producing appropriate paperwork is one way of complying with state regulations and requests, then doing so performs good citizenship. [...]

Discourses of bathroom contagion merge fears of “real germs” with “the fear of the other”; hence, public toilets provoke more anxiety than other germ-riddled public objects like computer terminals and doorknobs. Concerns about bathroom cleanliness are as much about bodily interactions and the difficulty of regulating public space as they are about actual dirt or waste. The racial integration of some U.S. workplaces during World War II, for example, prompted tremendous white anxiety about shared bathrooms, even as Black people had long cleaned toilets and beds, prepared food, and cared for children as part of their domestic work in white households. But this “private service work reinforced racialized gender hierarchies in ways that public intimacy undermined them.”

— Toby Beauchamp (2019), Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and US Surveillance Practices, pp. 81 - 101

In his book, Beauchamp argues that anti-trans bathroom bills should be understood as a form of state surveillance that is inextricable from anti-immigration and border security practices: these bills deputize members of the public to conduct bodily assessments of other people to determine whether they meet the criteria of a 'good citizen,' giving them the power to report 'fraudsters' to the authorities if a transgender person is found inhabiting a public bathroom. The criteria by which these assessments are conducted are explicitly white supremacist ones; not only because the imagined body of the 'good citizen' is one that reflects the ideals of white, bourgeois, cissexual bodies* (as clearly demarcated, binary gender roles is a sign of advanced white civilization, and perversion of these demarcations is a perversion of white civil life), but also because one of the primary forms of evidence that you belong in a gender-segregated public space (such as a bathroom) is a birth certificate, one issued by the state - as he says: "if producing appropriate paperwork is one way of complying with state regulations and requests, then doing so performs good citizenship." (p 93). Beauchamp criticizes the framing that trans people are treated like "second class citizens," as it accepts the white racial imaginary of (white) trans people being unfairly denied the benefits of full white citizenship; we should therefore understand gender segregated spaces not as a "remix" of "old" "historic" forms of racial segregation, but as a contemporary enforcement mechanism of it. Binaohan emphasizes this in their 2014 book Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101, arguing that non-white trans people are always "in public," denied any sort of private realm; they are always visible and marked as potential threats to white citizenship. (p. 39)

This is likewise reflected in Jenny Evang's 2022 work Is Gender Ideology Western Colonialism?, where she argues that anti-trans discourse situates the presumed natural state of 'sex' as being corrupted by an overly decadent form of Western cultural advancement, which is both degenerating the Western world and 'duping' the Global South into forsaking their relationship with nature, an argument that "[frames] “non-Western societies” as “more traditional” when it comes to gender, sexuality, and the family, since “gender ideology” has not yet gone as far there as in the West. Thus their argument relies on essentializing the very same conceptualization of “cultural difference” that structures femonationalist arguments in the first place, namely, that racialized, imagined elsewheres are stuck in a more traditional gender pattern, unable to keep up with the rampant development of the West." (p. 370). Locating the origin of transgenderism in the West reproduces notions of civilizational development, where the West is secure in its supreme cultural position but has merely gone "too far," "in the wrong direction," creating the circumstances of its own downfall - a downfall which is attributed both to mass immigration (particularly immigration of Muslims) and Marxism. (p. 372)

Fears of 'gender ideology' engulfing the Western world are inextricable from concerns about the maintenance of white social hygiene, as 'gender ideology' has been called "Ebola from Brussels" (p. 371), linking the corruption of binary, hierarchical, cissexual gender to a disease afflicting the body-politic of the white nation-state. The last paragraph of the quoted passage above from Beauchamp further demonstrates the fundamental interconnectedness between race, gender, and hygiene: The racial integration of some U.S. workplaces during World War II, for example, prompted tremendous white anxiety about shared bathrooms, even as Black people had long cleaned toilets and beds, prepared food, and cared for children as part of their domestic work in white households. But this private service work reinforced racialized gender hierarchies in ways that public intimacy undermined them." (p. 101) Discourses regarding public hygiene are civilizational discourses, as a clean world is a civilized world, and a civilized world can only be a white world.

*Beauchamp explicitly brings up that one of the 'problems' of using biometric data to scan the public for potential terrorists or 'fraudulent citizens' is the white inability to tell the difference between people belonging to different racial groups, i.e., the idea that all non-white people look too much alike and therefore must undergo even more intense scrutiny (p. 95).

#book club #even old new york was once new amsterdam

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darkeagleruins · 8 days

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Biden Admin Planning On Converting Our National Parks To Tent Illegals

“As if Biden's border crisis isn't bad enough, this administration is now seeking to convert our National Parks, America's most cherished natural treasures and historical sites, into tent cities for illegal aliens. Such actions not only debase our national heritage, but blatantly violate numerous federal statutes, including those governing management and protection of our national parks, NEPA and the Administrative Procedure Act.

How bad is this latest move to convert our national parks to ungovernable tent cities? While Wyoming's effort to prevent catastrophic wildfires destroying our national forests are met with intensive scrutiny from the unelected bureaucrats in this administration, president Biden is categorically exempting the housing of thousands of individuals in our national parks from any type of environmental review.

This double standard is indefensible, and the Biden min administration's refusal to engage with Congress on this bill only confirms that fact.

We need serious reforms to end the flood of illegal immigrants into our nation, not half measures that fail to correct the disaster of this administration's own making and endanger what is the very best idea America ever had. General Wood I urge my colleagues to protect our national parks by voting in favor of the bill. With that, I yield” - Wyoming Rep Harriet Hageman

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simply-ivanka · 1 month

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Suddenly Democrats Care About the Border

Biden and Schumer begin to see their political vulnerability.

By John Thune -- Wall Street Journal Opinion/ May 20, 2024

Trailing in the polls and desperate less than six months before Election Day, President Biden and Senate Democrats are trying something new: their best impersonations of Republicans.

The architects of the Biden border crisis—the worst in American history—suddenly want the American people to know they’re on the case. After three-plus years of mismanaging border security, resulting in more than nine million entries through the southern border, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is telegraphing that he may force Senate floor votes related to the border.

That’s his prerogative as leader, but I don’t expect anyone to buy this political theater. For starters, Mr. Biden has authority to take action at the border and to do so today. It’s the same authority he used to issue a multitude of executive actions relaxing border security, including rescinding the national emergency at the southern border, halting border-wall construction, ending the Remain in Mexico policy, and discouraging Immigration and Customs Enforcement from apprehending illegal immigrants.

The president this month ordered the removal of criminals and potential terrorists. This is a switch from the policy he started shortly after his inauguration, and the new order was made only after hundreds of people on the terrorist watchlist were encountered in between ports of entry on his watch. Vote for me, and I’ll clean up the historic mess I made is hardly an effective campaign pitch, and a few meaningless Senate votes won’t erase my Democratic colleagues’ long records of enabling illegal immigration.

In this Congress alone, Senate Democrats have banded together to protect taxpayer-funded flights for illegal immigrants to different states in the U.S. and keep federal dollars flowing to sanctuary cities. Democrats blocked votes on a litany of common-sense border-security and enforcement measures, including a proposal from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) that would have let state and local law enforcement detain criminal illegal aliens until ICE can deport them. They even stopped legislation from Sen. Ted Budd (R., N.C.) that would deem assaulting a law-enforcement officer a deportable offense.

Not one Senate Democrat supported H.R. 2, House Republicans’ signature border bill, after Senate Republicans twice forced it to be considered.

But now Democrats need voters in Montana, Ohio, Nevada and Pennsylvania to believe they’re serious about the border. They aren’t motivated by national security. They’re concerned about their own political vulnerability. They’ve recognized, albeit too late, that the chaos of an open border is a political liability.

If Mr. Schumer devotes floor time to debating border legislation, he should expect some difficult conversations ahead—the same kinds of conversations we would have had in the Senate if every Democrat hadn’t voted to dismiss the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas without a trial.

It’s abundantly clear that the American people want an end to lawlessness at the southern border. They want the president to do his job and defend America’s borders. The bad political bet that Mr. Biden and Mr. Schumer are making is that voters will hire the arsonists to put out the fire.

Mr. Thune, a South Dakota Republican, is Senate minority whip.

#Biden #Democrats #Schumer #Border #trump #trump 2024 #president trump #ivanka #repost #america first #americans first #america #donald trump

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mariacallous · 1 month

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On a sunny April afternoon in 2006, thousands of people flocked to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for a rally with celebrities, Olympic athletes, and rising political stars. Their cause: garner international support to halt a genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.

“If we care, the world will care. If we act, then the world will follow,” Barack Obama, then the junior Illinois senator, told the crowd, speaking alongside future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That same week, then-Sen. Joe Biden introduced a bill in Congress calling on NATO to intervene to halt the genocide in Sudan. “We need to take action on both a military and diplomatic front to end the conflict,” he said.

Flash-forward 18 years, and the prospect of genocide again looms in Sudan amid an explosive new civil war. But this time, there are no rallies, no A-list celebrities, no calls for outside military intervention. Few world leaders pay anything more than lip service to condemning the atrocities.

Fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced some 9 million since the conflict began in April 2023. The United States accused both sides of committing war crimes and atrocities and concluded that the RSF and its allied militias have committed ethnic cleansing.

Western officials and aid workers working on Sudan say they are vexed, and horrified, by the lack of international attention and resources the conflict is receiving—particularly compared to the global response to the conflict in 2006, which was the progenitor of the current conflagration.

If this trend continues and there is no forceful international crisis response, they warn, Sudan will likely collapse into a failed state and could face full-fledged genocide once again.

“You can’t help but watch the level of focus on crises like Gaza and Ukraine and wonder what just 5 percent of that energy could have done in a context like Sudan and how many thousands, tens of thousands of lives it could’ve saved,” said Alan Boswell, an expert on the region at the International Crisis Group.

The top general of the SAF, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the head of the RSF, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo, jointly seized power from a transitional government in a coup in 2021. Tensions between the rival sides escalated and finally erupted into war in April 2023.

In the 13 months since, the RSF has entrenched its positions around the national capital of Khartoum, forcing the SAF to relocate its headquarters to the coastal city of Port Sudan. The RSF has made steady gains in seizing control of Darfur and advancing southward and eastward against SAF forces. The SAF still controls territories around Khartoum and up the Nile River, a vital strategic route to Egypt; along the Red Sea coast; and the eastern borders with Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The conflict has also expanded into a full-fledged regional proxy war. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as Riyadh’s arch regional rival Iran, back the SAF, while the United Arab Emirates is reportedly funneling arms and military supplies to the RSF. The RSF also reportedly receives support from Chad and from Russia through its affiliated mercenary groups.

The focal point of the conflict now is on El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur and the center of fighting. The RSF has taken control of vast swaths of western and southern Sudan in its war against the SAF. El Fasher is the last SAF stronghold in Darfur, occupying a strategically important position for trade routes from neighboring Libya and Chad.

The RSF recently began its advance on El Fasher where an estimated 2 million to 2.8 million civilians have sought to take refuge from the fighting. (Precise figures are hard to come by.)

“The risk of genocide exists in Sudan. It is real, and it is growing every single day,” Alice Nderitu, the U.N. special advisor on the prevention of genocide, warned in a U.N. Security Council meeting last week.

A lengthy report from Human Rights Watch documented how the RSF and allied militias committed widespread atrocities, including mass rape, child murder, and massacres of civilians when it captured the Sudanese city of El Geneina last year. U.S. and U.N. officials and human rights experts warn that the same will likely happen if the RSF takes control of El Fasher, but on a much wider scale. The United States and aid groups have accused the SAF of blocking vital food aid from entering the country and RSF forces of looting humanitarian stocks, exacerbating the crisis and pushing regions of the country closer to famine.

“The potential fatality generation here is off the charts,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale’s School of Public Health who runs a research project that monitors the conflict in Sudan. “What will happen when the RSF takes El Fasher? Exactly what is happening in every other place they control.”

“There is Hiroshima- and Nagasaki-level casualty potential,” he added, referring to the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World War II that killed up to 225,000 people.

Aid organizations and officials who work on Sudan have long decried the relative inattention the conflict in Sudan gets compared to Ukraine or the war in Gaza. Some 20 million people—or 10 times the population of Gaza—are at risk of famine in various regions of Sudan. “Very few people who don’t work on Sudan know that Darfur is on the brink of famine,” Boswell said. “Obviously, everyone knows about the risk of famine in Gaza.”

U.S. President Joe Biden’s own social media posts about Gaza versus Sudan provide another, albeit imperfect, window into the attention each conflict receives. Biden tweeted about Israel or Gaza at least 107 times in the six months since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks that started the Israel-Hamas war. Since the war in Sudan began over a year ago, he has tweeted about Sudan four times—three of which were about the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum right after fighting broke out.

Aid groups are strained for resources to tackle the humanitarian crisis caused by the war. In February, Doctors Without Borders warned that in one refugee camp alone in North Darfur, one child was dying every two hours of malnutrition. In April, on the conflict’s first anniversary, aid groups said the international humanitarian response plan to aid the Sudanese was only 6 percent funded. At a donor conference that month in Paris, countries pledged $2 billion more—though that is still only about half of what aid groups estimate the country needs.

Biden appointed a special envoy for Sudan in February—Tom Perriello, a former U.S. representative from Virginia and State Department veteran. Most experts have cheered Perriello’s new push to hold cease-fire talks in the months since and engage U.S. lawmakers on Capitol Hill to bring more levers of U.S. power and financing to bear on Sudan, but they also fear his efforts may be too little, too late for the civilians trapped in El Fasher.

“It will be very hard to deescalate the situation, though everyone should try. But there is an aura of inevitability that this is all going to blow up,” Boswell said. “The degree of mobilization from all sides is hard to walk down.”

Diplomatic and aid officials working on Sudan have some theories on why the atrocities in Darfur and across the country are receiving such little attention now compared to the 2000s, but none gives a full answer.

In 2006, the United States was still reaching the heights of its post-9/11 “war on terror” campaign. Sudan, under former dictator Omar al-Bashir, had given safe haven to Osama bin Laden as he built up al Qaeda’s global terror network, and “bashing Bashir and his genocide in Darfur couched nicely with [counterterrorism] priorities” of the U.S. government at the time, said Nicole Widdersheim, a former senior National Security Council official now with Human Rights Watch.

The memories of failed and successful international interventions to halt genocide—Rwanda in 1994 and the Balkans later that decade, respectively—were still relatively fresh in the minds of policymakers. The costly Western campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya that later exposed the shortcomings and blowback of military interventions were still underway.

It also preceded the current era of great-power competition, where Washington is intensely focused on countering Russia and China. Sudan also competes with the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine for international attention and humanitarian resources. Others suggested racism built into Western foreign policy played a part. “It’s seen as yet ‘another war in Africa like all the others,’” said one official dryly. Not one single factor can explain it all, experts concluded.

“Gaza is taking up the always limited American public interest and activism on a foreign crisis, but to be fair, there was nearly no public activism or engagement on the Sudan war before” the Israel-Hamas war, Widdersheim said.

Experts say the relative inattention Sudan has gotten from the top echelons of the White House and other Western powers that could have influence in pressuring the warring sides in Sudan to sit for peace talks has led to the current protracted state of the war.

Biden hosted Kenyan President William Ruto for a state visit this week, where the two called on “the warring parties in Sudan to facilitate unhindered humanitarian access and immediately commit to a ceasefire” toward the end of a lengthy joint statement but did not elaborate further. U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas Greenfield have also been outspoken about urging an end to the conflict in Sudan.

Successive cease-fire talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, over the past year, brokered by the United States and Saudi Arabia, failed to clinch any lasting deal. Those talks were led on the U.S. side not by a top White House official or Secretary of State Antony Blinken, but by the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Molly Phee.

Behind-the-scenes efforts by some members of Congress in December 2023 to appoint a special presidential envoy on Sudan—one who would report directly to the White House, rather than an envoy reporting to the assistant secretary of state—were unsuccessful, multiple officials and congressional aides said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration dynamics. Perriello was appointed two months later.

Perriello in mid-April said that cease-fire talks would resume in Jeddah “within the next three weeks,” but so far those talks have yet to materialize. Several current and former officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak candidly, said the talks in Jeddah could resume in June, by which point the RSF could have already captured El Fasher from the mostly cutoff SAF forces.

“The need to start formal peace talks in Jeddah is absolutely urgent, and the United States is working exhaustively with partners to make that happen,” said a State Department spokesperson. “But we are not waiting for formal talks to begin—rather, we have accelerated our diplomatic engagements to align international efforts to end this war, mitigate the humanitarian crisis, and prevent future atrocities.”

Cease-fire talks have worked in limited ways in the past, such as when the United States got both sides to briefly stop fighting in Khartoum so it could evacuate its embassy in April 2023. “When the right leverage is put on the table at the right time to get the RSF and SAF to stop fighting, it can be done,” said Kholood Khair, a Sudanese policy analyst and founding director of Confluence Advisory, a Sudan-focused think tank. “The international community has just chosen not to deploy that same leverage this time around.”

Khair added that the Jeddah talks format has failed before, and it will likely fail again. “The concern is that because of the laziness and complicity of the international community at this point, you don’t have any diplomats who are looking for a new way of doing things. Jeddah in many ways is blocking the start of any new diplomatic efforts or other good ideas that could be effective.”

“Diplomats are fixated on Jeddah now, simply because it’s already there,” Khair said.

As Perriello engaged in frenetic diplomacy, he has also publicly marveled at how little attention the scale of the conflict and death in Sudan is receiving on the international stage.

“One of the things that to me captures just how invisible and horrific this war is, is that we don’t have a credible death count,” Perriello said during a congressional hearing in front of the 21-member Senate Foreign Relations Committee this month. “We literally don’t know how many people have died—possibly to a factor of 10 or 15. The number was earlier 15,000 to 30,000. Some think it’s at 150,000,” he said. During the course of Perriello’s hearing, senators cycled out of the room due to scheduling conflicts, often leaving only one senator in the room and 20 empty seats.

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