#De facto states

[saxafimedianetwork]

Somaliland In Searching For New Partners

The presentation will offer insight into the strategies #Somaliland is using to attract new partners such as Arab countries & #Taiwan. At the same time, it needs to keep partnerships with old allies such as #Ethiopia or the #USA.

Continue reading Untitled

[veinsfullofstars]

🐀 Big rat meet li’l guy ★

(ID: Kirby series fanart of Shadow Kirby hanging out and interacting with Storo. Top - Storo and SK standing side-by-side carrying hammers, the rat looking over in wide-eyed surprise to see the puffball proudly hoisting up a hammer almost twice his size in one hand, a blue-and-white rope headband on his head. Bottom left - Storo sitting on the ground, leaning back slightly on one hand and holding up a bashful-looking SK in the palm of the other, a though bubble over his head showing the image of a basketball. Bottom right - SK and Storo wearing chef hats and standing side-by-side at a counter, the rat pinching his fingers in a chef’s kiss pose and lifting a cloche to reveal a plate of tasty-looking omurice, the puffball gazing at the dish in starry-eyed wonder. END ID.)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 (you’re here!) | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Compilation

Sketch started btw 12/23 - 05/24, render started 05/23/24, finished 05/25/24, updated for color correction 11/02/24.

[cto10121]

Shakespeare/Marlowe is quickly becoming my NOTP, no lie.

[nomairuins]

my tags on that went on for so long i had to go back and edit them to fit tag limit and i still had to delete a bunch of them. Its the autism it literally is

[xtruss]

Houston, Texas: Where Asylum Cases Come To Die! Some Immigration Lawyers Relish A Challenge

— By Dan Halpern | April 14, 2024 | 1843 Magazine

So this is what I want you to say: that you fear you would be killed.” It was early March and Laure Dachelet, a lawyer based in Houston, Texas, was preparing a client who was about to present his asylum case before a judge. “I mean, they threatened to kill you several times. They put a bomb in front of your house. So the intention to kill you was pretty clear. You need to say so.”

The client, a 30-year-old man called Farid, nodded gently. It had been a long wait to get to this point. Farid had fled Afghanistan in 2014 and, after a perilous three-year journey to America that took him through a dozen countries, applied for asylum in 2017; he had yet to see a judge, seven years later. Until 2014 he had worked as a translator for the British Army and the Afghan national police at a military base outside Lashkar Gah, in Helmand province. Driving home one night, after his last day at work, he was stopped by Taliban forces.

“The Taliban beat me and then let me go,” was how Farid had initially described the incident. With Dachelet’s prodding, a longer narrative emerged. The Taliban had accused him of working with the enemy. Farid insisted that he was coming back from a doctor’s appointment. They beat him and interrogated him, but Farid stuck to his story and finally they let him go. Days later the Taliban found proof that he had worked with the British. They told Farid’s father that they would kill his son when they found him, then they bombed Farid’s home.

The Taliban Found Proof That Farid Had Worked With The British. They Told His Father That They Would Kill His Son When They Found Him, Then They Bombed Farid’s Home

Dachelet, who had previously been a judge in the French family courts, explained that the judge would try to suss out whether Farid was telling the truth. She would evaluate his demeanour, watch for whether he answered or avoided questions, check whether his story was consistent with his written declaration and documents. That was always the danger for an asylum-seeker: an applicant could have all the boxes ticked, but a judge was free to decide he was lying. The more detailed your story, the more likely a judge is to believe it. But asylum lawyers need to weigh up carefully how much information their clients provide. The more they offer, the greater the possibility that under examination they will confuse or misremember events.

Farid mentioned that before they took him to be interrogated, the Taliban had covered his face with a scarf. Why had they done that, asked Dachelet?

“In Islam, in the religion, if your clothes are bloody, you cannot pray on that day, you will need to change your clothes,” said Farid. “So they didn’t want to get blood on their—”

Dachelet interrupted. “Why were you bleeding?”

“Oh, because they hit me with the back of the gun.”

“OK, this is why we need to be more detailed,” said Dachelet. “You need to say, one of them hit me in the face with the butt of the AK-47 and I started bleeding. You talk about the scarf, and the blood, and we don’t really make the connection. I know your story, you know your story. Let’s pretend the judge and the attorney for the government don’t know your story.”

She asked Farid what date he arrived in America. He thought about it before replying: “2017. August, or September.”

“July,” Dachelet said.

“July? I don’t think it was July,” Farid said.

“July is what we said on your declaration,” Dachelet said.

This mistake was concerning. A judge is on the lookout for inconsistencies in an applicant’s story – the de facto rule is that three mistakes like this can be grounds for rejection. One judge may have some sympathy for the argument that no one can remember every date and detail of their life story perfectly accurately; another may have none.

In this case, Farid’s mistake might have resulted from his confusion over how dates are formatted in America – with the month before the day – which is different from how other countries do it. But it’s exactly the kind of thing some judges could use to deny his claim. He would need to stick to July.

Dachelet explained that, in order to grant asylum, the judge would need to be convinced that Farid was likely to face persecution if he returned home. “What makes you think you might be in danger if you went home?” she asked. “This all happened ten years ago, don’t you think they’ll have just forgotten about it?

A Judge Is On The Lookout For Inconsistencies In An Applicant’s Story – The de Facto Rule Is That Three Mistakes Like This Can Be Grounds For Rejection

“When the Taliban took over, they announced that they were forgiving all the people, wherever you worked…[They said] we are forgiving them, they can come, they come and be peaceful,” Farid said. “A lot of people went back. Most of them disappeared.”

Farid’s case seemed undeniable. He had a terrible story, a credible fear that he would be persecuted if he were deported, both for who he was and what he had done; he had documents proving what he said was true. He had been in the country for seven years, working long hours as a truck driver, a lawful contributor to society, if not yet a full member of it. But Houston is where asylum cases come to die.

Nationally, immigration courts grant asylum in about four out of ten cases. Houston’s courts, in common with those in Charlotte, Atlanta, Kansas City and a few other places, grant asylum in one out of ten. San Francisco’s courts, by contrast, approve seven out of ten asylum claims, while New York’s courts approve six out of ten.

These disparities can be partly explained by the fact that different kinds of migrants tend to settle in different cities. More Central Americans, for instance, come to Texas; more Asians come to California. Their cases for asylum tend to be very different.

Whether or not a case is successful can also depend on the judge. A national study of disparities in asylum adjudications found, for example, that Colombian applicants who brought their cases in Miami were granted asylum by one judge in 88% of cases, whereas another – in the same building – granted it only 5% of the time.

On the one hand Farid was unlucky. According to his lawyers, the judge who would be presiding over his case had previously rejected nine out of ten asylum applications (although the huge majority of her cases had come from Central America and Mexico, whose citizens have very low rates of successful applications across the court systems).

On the other hand, he was lucky that his case had been taken on by a law firm with an impressive record in asylum cases. Dachelet works for Political Asylum Lawyers, which was founded in 2020 by Brian Manning (above), a former asylum officer. It is unusual among immigration law firms: although most take on asylum cases, very few are dedicated to them. Manning told me that out of the 39 cases the firm has seen to conclusion over the past two years, only eight have resulted in deportation.

Manning grew up in Oklahoma and came from a background much like everyone he knew: white, Christian and conservative. He played high-school football and went to church on Sundays. Most of his contemporaries stayed in their home state. But in his third year at university, Manning spent a semester in St Petersburg, Russia, and felt the world open up. He finished law school, got married and joined the foreign service, working in Croatia, Bulgaria and Chile. He and his wife adopted two boys from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Although the couple loved living abroad, they wanted to raise their children in America, near their families. Early in 2017, as Donald Trump took office, they returned home.

Asylum-Seekers Typically Have No More Than An Hour To Convince An Asylum Officer That They Face A Significant Risk Of Persecution If They Return Home

Manning yearned for a career where he was “actually helping people and doing a good thing”. In Bulgaria, he had visited a camp for Syrian refugees, which had given him the idea to specialise in asylum law. He got a job as an asylum officer, working for the immigration service in Houston. He spent his days conducting “credible fear” interviews: one of the first steps in the asylum process. Asylum-seekers typically have no more than an hour to convince an asylum officer that they face a significant risk of persecution if they return home. If they pass, they can apply for asylum. If they fail, they have a right to appeal against the decision before a judge.

It was a tough job. “You’re hearing stories all day about torture and terrible things happening to people,” he said, “and you either think that they’re lying to you, which is frustrating, or you believe it, and you’re like, this is how this person had to live? This is what this person had to go through? My God.” Asylum officers typically burnt out around a year and a half in, Manning said, many of them suffering from a sort of secondary ptsd.

Most of the people he interviewed were from Central America, and described terrible poverty and violence: “You won’t join my gang? We’re going to kill you. You can’t pay my extortion fee for your shop? We’re going to kill you.” But as tragic as their stories were, most of the applicants were unlikely to satisfy the authorities handling their claims. People seeking asylum in America must demonstrate that they have suffered or were likely to suffer persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group.

During the two years he worked as an asylum officer, Manning was depressed by the quality of asylum lawyers he met, most of whom, he said, were lousy, lazy and ineffective. Not that he encountered them that often. Asylum hearings are civil not criminal proceedings, so the government is not required to provide a lawyer, and few applicants can afford one. Sometimes asylum-seekers were helped by lawyers from non-profit organisations, who were generally excellent, said Manning, although there weren’t enough of them.

It was this feeling – that there were deserving applicants who were being let down by the system – that drove him to start his own firm. Manning felt that his experience playing for the other side, so to speak, could help his clients navigate a system of Byzantine complexity. He reckons that specialising in asylum law makes it easier to stay on top of the frequent changes to the law, something that a firm with a wider range of immigration issues might find challenging.

One piece of advice he gives his clients is knowing when it’s OK to admit you’ve lied. Because you can apply for asylum only once you are in America, and can’t get a visa to ask for asylum, many refugees claim they are coming for a holiday, even though they fully intend to overstay their tourist visa. “This kind of lie is not held against you at an asylum hearing,” Manning said. “But it is a problem if you say at your asylum interview that you’ve never lied in connection with a us immigration matter.” That is, you can lie to get here, but not lie about having lied. This is a favourite technique, he said, of asylum officers looking for excuses to reject applicants.

Manning Shares His Tips On Social Media, Including TikTok And Instagram. He’s Doing It To Attract Business, But Also To Help Those Who Can’t Afford His Services

Manning shares his tips on social media, including TikTok and Instagram. He’s doing it to attract business, but also to help those who can’t afford his services. The videos are professionally made, with choppy, attention-grabbing edits. “What if I told you you can pretty much win your asylum case before you ever set foot in the asylum office for your interview?” he says in one video, which takes viewers through creating an “asylum roadmap”. Most asylum officers are overworked and stressed, said Manning. They appreciate being presented with a package containing all the necessary information and legal reasoning: a written narrative, evidence to support it, and a description of the political conditions in the applicant’s homeland. It works, says Manning, “because you’ve done much of their work for them”.

Farad’s hearing took place on a Monday morning. He had the dates right this time, told his story clearly, and addressed the questions from the government lawyer directly and honestly. But there’s no such thing as an open-and-shut case, especially in asylum law. “I still get nervous, I’m certainly emotionally invested,” Manning said. “That’s natural for anyone working with these kinds of high stakes, or working with so much trauma. Did I cover everything I need to cover? Did I prepare enough for any surprises? I’ll go over it and over it.”

The hearing lasted just under an hour. “I’m inclined to grant the application,” the judge told Farid. The lawyer for the government said they would not appeal. It seemed done and dusted. Except it wasn’t, quite. Farid’s biometric information (including his fingerprints and photographs) were missing from the government’s file. Somehow, in the seven years he had been waiting, they had been misplaced. The judge couldn’t grant asylum until Farid made an appointment to have his biometric information recorded again. To get an appointment, he was told, he would have to wait only another few months. ■

— Dan Halpern is a Feature Writer ✍️ For 1843 Magazine | Illustrations: James Wilson | Images: Getty, Reuters

[i-am-aprl]

The US single-handedly blocked the UN from recognizing Palestine by vetoing a draft resolution in the Security Council that recommended that “the State of Palestine be admitted to membership of the UN.” With 12 council members voting yes, a clear majority voted in favor; only the UK and Switzerland abstained.

Meanwhile, 139 of the 193 UN member states already recognize Palestine, virtually all of the world safe for the Global North and its closest allies.

Even in the EU, several countries are set to recognize Palestine soon. Since 2012, the Palestinians have been a non-member observer state to the UN, a de facto recognition of statehood granted by the UN General Assembly.

However, the Security Council and then at least two-thirds of the General Assembly must approve an application to become a full member of the world body.

The Palestinian push for full membership came six months into Israel’s devastating war of extermination against the Gaza Strip, and as Israel is expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank, which the UN already considers to be illegal.

[odinsblog]

The website says it will help the viewer register to vote. But once a user clicks “Register to Vote,” the experience he or she will have can be very different, depending on where they live.

If a user lives in a state that is not considered competitive in the presidential election, like California or Wyoming for example, they'll be prompted to enter their email addresses and ZIP code and then directed quickly to a voter registration page for their state, or back to the original sign-up section.

But for users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.

Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.

If they agree to submit all that, the system still does not steer them to a voter registration page. Instead, it shows them a “thank you” page.

So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.

Specifically, a political action committee created by Tesla

CEO Elon Musk, one aimed at giving the Republican presidential nominee Trump an advantage in his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris, the de facto Democratic nominee.

“I have created a PAC, or a super PAC ... the America PAC,” Musk said in a recent interview.

(continue reading)

[whetstonefires]

there are contexts where people are lashing out because Group Hurt Them and you need to point out that that's not appropriate and these are not the right people to punish, if indeed punishment is a relevant response.

(for a relatively uncontroversial case, take the Angry Ex-Christian Atheists Trashing All Religion discourse that's been on my dash a lot lately. jewish people saying 'you need to stop being aggressive toward religious minorities because of your issues with christianity' is not a 'not all X' argument in the invalid sense even when they need to repeat several times that not every religion is, in fact, identical to Christianity.)

the 'not all X' argument is tarnished not because it's never important or relevant that there's nuance within groups that are being Described As Bad by someone who isn't strictly speaking falsehood, but because it's a concept so frequently weaponized to invalidate people's grief and anger, and recenter whoever they're angry at, usually a group with hegemonic status that wants to take refuge from collective responsibility in individualism.

when that's not the context, that's also not the problem. sometimes it can be genuinely hard to decide whether that's the context because anything this complex is rife with edge cases, but.

the thing is there's actually a whole lateral violence treadmill where traumatized people seek to define easy targets as representatives of Powerful Bad Group so they can lash out safely and get an easy win for personal catharsis. (this is. historically a huge part of antisemitism.)

they don't even have to outright misuse labeling like in the Religions example above: a disabled white man being abused by his female social worker (example from life) isn't actually not a white man just because he's institutionally vulnerable in a different way. but it's sure disingenuous to argue on the basis of that access to hegemony that he's too powerful for the abuse to be real or bad.

(this corrupted interpretation of feminism getting leveraged this way is a lot of the ideological basis of the TERF movement, and it's important to realize that the TERF logic isn't just wrong as a matter of definitions, in refusing to recognize trans genders as real, but in its underlying belief system about how it's okay to treat people on the basis of category policing.)

the guy in the original post is either very dumb or arguing in bad faith, but the overcorrection against Not All X that allows people to abuse identity politics to hurt people for personal or political reasons is something we all need to learn to watch out for.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but telling a white supremacist “you don’t speak for me and are not in fact normal” is a very fair and good thing to do. It’s not at all the same as making a “not all white people” comment like the last guy thinks, and it’s especially cringeworthy that he’s another, different white guy himself. It’s like trying too hard to flex allyship. Don’t be a pedant to people who are shutting down a racist’s argument.

[apocalypticdemon]

every day I think about how the admissions office fucked around with the money I was told I was going to get and every day I get so mad about it

[prokopetz]

The whole Reddit thing is an especially striking example of corporate brain rot because, like, they managed to build their entire business model on the back of exploiting vast quantities of unpaid volunteer labour, and successfully convinced the entire Internet that this is a normal state of affairs. How do you fuck that up? How do you convince yourself that instituting a de facto demand for your very nearly 100% volunteer workforce to pay you for the ability to use the tools that are required to do their job is anything other than cutting your own throat?

[saxafimedianetwork]

Would Somaliland’s Citizens Benefit From State Capacity Libertarianism?

#Somaliland’s citizens would not be “better off stateless”. They have, however, benefitted from having a small state with limited capacity that has been allowed to develop in accordance with its own societal traditions & largely free from the kind of intrusive international interventions that have singularly failed to construct a viable centralized Somali state in Mogadishu.

Continue reading Untitled

[fatehbaz]

was thinking about this

To be in "public", you must be a consumer or a laborer.

About control of peoples' movement in space/place. Since the beginning.

"Vagrancy" of 1830s-onward Britain, people criminalized for being outside without being a laborer.

Breaking laws resulted in being sentenced to coerced debtor/convict labor. Coinciding with the 1830-ish climax of the Industrial Revolution and the land enclosure acts (factory labor, poverty, etc., increase), the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 establishes full-time police institution(s) in London. The "Workhouse Act" aka "Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834" forced poor people to work for a minimum number of hours every day. The Irish Constabulary of 1837 sets up a national policing force and the County Police Act of 1839 allows justices of the peace across England to establish policing institutions in their counties (New York City gets a police department in 1844). The major expansion of the "Vagrancy Act" of 1838 made "joblessness" a crime and enhanced its punishment. (Coincidentally, the law's date of royal assent was 27 July 1838, just 5 days before the British government was scheduled to allow fuller emancipation of its technical legal abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean on 1 August 1838.)

---

"Vagrancy" of 1860s-onward United States, people criminalized for being outside while Black.

Widespread emancipation after slavery abolition in 1865 rapidly followed by the outlawing of loitering which de facto outlawed existing as Black in public. Inability to afford fines results in being sentenced to forced labor by working on chain gangs or prisons farms, some built atop plantations.

---

"Vagrancy" of 1870s-onward across empires, people criminalized for being outside while being "foreign" and also being poor generally.

Especially from 1880-ish to 1918-ish, this was an age of widespread mass movement of peoples due to the land dispossession, poverty, and famine induced by global colonial extraction and "market expansion" (Scramble for Africa, US "American West", nation-building, conquering "frontiers"), as agricultural "revolutions" of imperial monoculture cash crop extraction resulted in ecological degradation, and as major imperial infrastructure building projects required a lot of vulnerable "mobile" labor. This coincides with and is facilitated by new railroad networks and telegraphs, leading to imperial implementation or expansion of identity documents, strict work contracts, passports, immigration surveillance, and border checkpoints.

All of this in just a few short years: In 1877, British administrators in India develop what would become the Henry Classification System of taking and keeping fingerprints for use in binding colonial Indians to legal contracts. That same year during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, and in response to white anxiety about Black residents coming to the city during Great Migration, Chicago's policing institutions exponentially expand surveillance and pioneer "intelligence card" registers for tracking labor union organizing and Black movement, as Chicago's experiments become adopted by US military and expanded nationwide, later used by US forces monitoring dissent in colonial Philippines and Cuba. Japan based its 1880 Penal Code anti-vagrancy statutes on French models, and introduced "koseki" register to track poor/vagrant domestic citizens as Tokyo's Governor Matsuda segregates classes, and the nation introduces "modern police forces". In 1882, the United States passes the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1884, the Ottoman government enacts major "Passport Nizamnamesi" legislation requiring passports. In 1885, the racist expulsion of the "Tacoma riot".

Punished for being Algerian in France. Punished for being Chinese in San Francisco. Punished for being Korean in Japan. Punished for crossing Ottoman borders without correct paperwork. Arrested for whatever, then sent to do convict labor. A poor person in the Punjab, starving during a catastrophic famine, might be coerced into a work contract by British authorities. They will have to travel, shipped off to build a railroad. But now they have to work. Now they are bound. They will be punished for being Punjabi and trying to walk away from Britain's tea plantations in Assam or Britain's rubber plantations in Malaya.

Mobility and confinement, the empire manipulates each.

---

"Vagrancy" amidst all of this, people also criminalized for being outside while "unsightly" and merely even superficially appearing to be poor. San Francisco introduced the notorious "ugly law" in 1867, making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view". Today, if you walk into a building looking a little "weird" (poor, Black, ill, disabled, etc.), you are given seething spiteful glares and asked to leave. De facto criminalized for simply going for a stroll without downloading the coffee shop's exclusive menu app.

Too ill, too poor, too exhausted, too indebted to move, you are trapped. Physical barriers (borders), legal barriers (identity documents), financial barriers (debt). "Vagrancy" everywhere in the United States, a combination of all of the above. "Vagrancy" since at least early nineteenth century Europe. About the control of movement through and access to space/place. Concretizing and weaponizing caste, corralling people, anchoring them in place, extracting their wealth and labor.

You are permitted to exist only as a paying customer or an employee.

[mariacallous]

It is over and everything is lost. This is the refrain repeated by Armenian families as they take that final step across the border out of their home of Nagorno-Karabakh.

In just a handful of days more than 100,000 people, almost the entire Armenian population of the breakaway enclave, has fled fearing ethnic persecution at the hands of Azerbaijani forces. The world barely registered it. But this astonishing exodus has vanished a self-declared state that thousands have died fighting for and ended a decades-old bloody chapter of history.

On Saturday, along that dusty mountain road to neighbouring Armenia, a few remaining people limp to safety after enduring days in transit.

Among them is the Tsovinar family who appear bundled in a hatchback littered with bullet holes, with seven relatives crushed in the back. Hasratyan, 48, the mother, crumbles into tears as she tries to make sense of her last 48 hours. The thought she cannot banish is that from this moment forward, she will never again be able to visit the grave of her brother killed in a previous bout of fighting.

“He is buried in our village which is now controlled by Azerbaijan. We can never go back,” the mother-of-three says, as her teenage girls sob quietly beside her.

“We have lost our home, and our homeland. It is an erasing of a people. The world kept silent and handed us over”.

She is interrupted by several ambulances racing in the opposite direction towards Nagorno-Karabakh’s main city of Stepanakert, or Khankendi, as it is known by the Azerbaijani forces that now control the streets. Their job is to fetch the few remaining Karabakh Armenians who want to leave and have yet to make it out.

“Those left are the poorest who have no cars, the disabled and elderly who can’t move easily,” a first responder calls at us through the window. “Then we’re told that’s it.”

As the world focused on the United Nations General Assembly, the war in Ukraine and, in the UK, the felling of an iconic Sycamore tree, a decades old war has reignited here unnoticed.

It ultimately heralded the end of Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway Armenian region, that is internationally recognised as being part of Azerbaijan but for several decades has enjoyed de facto independence. It has triggered the largest movement of people in the South Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Azerbaijan has vehemently denied instigating ethnic cleansing and has promised to protect Armenians as it works to reintegrate the enclave.

But in the border town of Goris, surrounded by the chaotic arrival of hundreds of refugees, Armenia’s infrastructure minister says Yerevan was now struggling to work out what to do with tens of thousands of displaced and desperate people.

“Simply put this is a modern ethnic cleansing that has been permitted through the guilty silence of the world,” minister Gnel Sanosyan tells The Independent, as four new busses of fleeing families arrive behind him.

“This is a global shame, a shame for the world. We need the international community to step up and step up now.”

The divisions in this part of the world have their roots in centuries-old conflict but the latest iterations of bitter bloodshed erupted during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Karabakh Armenians, who are in the majority in the enclave, demanded the right to autonomy over the 4,400 square kilometre rolling mountainous region that has its own history and dialect. In the early 1990s they won a bloody war that uprooted Azerbaijanis, building a de facto state that wasn’t internationally unrecognised.

That is until in 2020. Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, launched a military offensive and took back swathes of territory in a six-week conflict that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians. Russia, which originally supported Armenia but in recent years has grown into a colder ally, brokered a fragile truce and deployed peacekeepers.

But Moscow failed to stop Baku in December, enforcing a 10-month blockade on Nagorno-Karabakh, strangling food, fuel, electricity and water supplies. Then, the international community stood by as Azerbaijan launched a 24-hour military blitz that proved too much for Armenian separatist forces. Outgunned, outnumbered and weakened by the blockade, they agreed to lay down their weapons.

For 30 years the Karabakh authorities had survived pressure from international powerhouses to give up statehood or at least downgrade their aspirations for Nagorno-Karabakh. For 30 years peace plans brokered by countries across the world were tabled and shelved.

And then in a week all hope vanished and the self-declared government agreed to dissolve.

Fearing further shelling and then violent reprisals, as news broke several Karabakh officials including former ministers and separatist commanders, had been arrested by Azerbaijani security forces, people flooded over the border.

At the political level there are discussions about “reintegration” and “peace” but with so few left in Nagorno-Karabakh any process would now be futile.

And so now, sleeping in tents on the floors of hotels, restaurants and sometimes the streets of border towns, shellshocked families, with a handful of belongings, are trying to piece their lives together.

Among them is Vardan Tadevosyan, Nagorno-Karabakh’s minister of health until the government was effectively dissolved on Thursday. He spent the night camping on the floor of a hotel, and carries only the clothes he is wearing. Exhausted he says he had “no idea what the future brings”.

“For 25 years I have built a rehabilitation centre for people with physical disabilities I had to leave it all behind. You don’t know how many people are calling me for support,” he says as his phone ringed incessantly in the background throughout the interview.

“We all left everything behind. I am very depressed,” he repeats, swallowing the sentence with a sigh.

Next to him Artemis, 58, a kindergarten coordinator who has spent 30 years in Steparankert, says the real problems were going to start in the coming weeks when the refugees outstay their temporary accommodation.

“The Azerbaijanis said they want to integrate Nagorno-Karabakh but how do you blockade a people for 10 months and then launch a military operation and then ask them to integrate?” she asks, as she prepares for a new leg of the journey to the Armenian capital where she hopes to find shelter.

“The blockade was part of the ethnic cleansing. This is the only way to get people to flee the land they love. There is no humanity left in the world.”

Back in the central square of Goris, where families pick through piles of donated clothes and blankets and aid organisations hand out food, the loudest question is: what next?

Armenian officials are busy registering families and sending them to shelters in different corners of the country. But there are unanswered queries about long-term accommodation, work and schooling.

“I can’t really think about it, it hurts too much,” says Hasratyan’s eldest daughter Lilet, 16, trembling in the sunlight as the family starts the registration process.

“All I can say to the world is please speak about this and think about us. We are humans, people made of blood, like you and we need your help.”

[txttletale]

I'm asking this genuinely, as a 19 yo with no education in economics and a pretty surface level understanding of socialism: can you explain the whole Bananas discourse in a way someone like me might understand? In my understanding it's just "This is just a product we can give up to create better worker conditions and that's fine" but apparently that's not the full picture?

alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.

so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.

there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.

when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.

why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!

this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.

so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:

the workers that grow them are barely paid, mistreated, prevented from unionizing, and sometimes murdered

the nations in which the bananas are grown accept brutally unfair trade and tariff terms with the USA because they desperately need a supply of US dollars and so have little position to negotiate

shipping is also much cheaper than it should be because sailors are chronically underpaid and often not paid at all or forced to pay to work (!)

bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.

so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".

(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)

and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!

tldr: it is not imperialism when produce go on boat but it is imperialism when produce grown for dirt cheap by underpaid workers in a country with a devalued currency is then bought and exported and sold by usamerican companies creating huge amounts of economic value of which the nation in which the banana was grown, let alone the people who actually fucking grew it, don't see a cent -- and this is the engine behind the cheap, available-every-day-all-year-everywhere presence of bananas in the usa (and other places!)

[so-i-did-this-thing]

How it's going as a trans person in Florida: Planned Parenthood, 26Health, and Spektrum Health have announced they have paused all gender affirming care.

To recap, DeSantis signed several anti-trans bills into law this week. Care is banned for minors, care is all but banned for adults, Don't Say Gay has been extended, children can be kidnapped from affirming parents by non-affirming family, and there is a bathroom bill that subjects trans folks to arrest for using government owned facilities, such as those in courthouses, airports, many stadiums and parks.

The adult effective ban was felt immediately. The main elements are:

signing at every visit an in-person informed consent form created by the state

all care come from physicians instead of nurse practitioners

no telemed for gender-affirming care

Currently, it is unknown if existing HRT prescriptions written by NPs will be honored by pharmacies. I personally know one person who was able to pick up testosterone yesterday, but I have also read many reports of folks being denied. I myself don't have a refill ready for another 10 days and will report back after I try my own pickup.

What's additionally dangerous is those of us, myself included, who get non-HRT prescriptions from our gender clinics now face the uncertainty of continuing of *all* of our medical care. Our health clinics are at risk of shuttering permanently as they lose major income, and many of us will lose STD meds, depression meds, heart meds, etc, etc.

When we say "this will kill us," it goes beyond suicide risk from forced detransition.

"But you can still get HRT from a physician."

So many suck or are outright hostile and the demand outstrips the supply. Before I found my NP-run clinic, one physician just decided to not call in my Rx, another was so shit at reading lab results, he thought I had hepatitis, and the third I had to threaten to kick in the teeth for trying to force too large a speculum in me.

Also, the state-required consent form has not been finalized and distributed yet, so at this point, everything has pretty much ground to a halt.

It was estimated that 80% of trans adults would lose their healthcare because of how many use providers like Planned Parenthood, but the impact seems even greater now.

"You can get your non-gender care elsewhere still."

DeSantis recently signed a bill that allows healthcare professionals to discriminate against trans people.

Sure, we can try to find care elsewhere, but it will be a slow and expensive process, with no guarantees. It took me over 20 years to get my heart condition treated because of transphobic doctors.

What can I do as a trans Floridian?

Stay in communication with your clinic - many are working on getting physicians added to the roster to prescribe HRT. Lawsuits are being filed and it's possible the changes to adult care can be rolled back.

Continue to try to pick up your meds, but begin looking for care elsewhere, though. Inside and outside the state.

Remember that while telemed for gender affirming care has been banned, you can still cross state lines for care. See Erin's map of informed consent clinics.

Many people will turn to DIY, but be sure you are aware of the risks here, especially if on testosterone, which is a controlled substance.

What should I be worried about next as a trans Floridian?

I worry about the following next steps towards genocide:

Banning getting care out of state. This is from the anti-abortion playbook. They will likely start with kids again, but we've seen how quickly adult care gets axed.

Being declared mentally incompetent or a risk in some way. This could be anything from being barred from gun ownership to not being allowed to work for the government.

Being declared a de facto predator. This has already happened with the latest bathroom law (cis people can eject trans people from government owned single-gender facilities, with arrest as a penalty), so watch out for it being applied to privately-owned facilities. Watch for discussions of official lists of trans people.

Gender presentation enforcement laws, essentially banning "cross dressing". Laws that block or rollback documentation changes.

These all have historic precedence and are huge "I'm in danger" red flags.

What can I do as a cis person?

Amplify all this news. Talk frankly about how this is genocide. And donate what you can to trans mutual aid campaigns so people can travel to get healthcare or even leave the state.

Here's some articles to get started on building awareness:

Take care, everyone, of yourself and each other.