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jewish-privilege · 6 years ago

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It’s been largely forgotten, but when Russian military intelligence created online cutouts in 2016 to manipulate the American electorate, the Democratic Party wasn’t its only target.

The most prominent of those fake digital identities was Guccifer 2.0, which took credit for hacking the Democratic National Committee and then provided the pilfered information to WikiLeaks. The other was called DCLeaks. On Aug. 29, 2016, two months after the DNC hack became public, DCLeaks’ now-banned Twitter account told its followers to check out another of its projects: “Find Soros files on soros.dcleaks.com.”

Visitors to the now-shuttered site could find purported documents from the billionaire philanthropist’s Open Society Foundations, which promote liberal values and democratization. They had file names like “public health program access to medicine” and “youth exchange my city real world.” But before those curious about the leaks got there, the Russians wanted to put George Soros in a particular context.

The homepage displayed a photo illustration of a smug-looking Soros in the midst of four scenes of street chaos whose apparent perpetrators were conspicuously nonwhite. They were taken from the Ferguson, Missouri, protests in 2014, the birthplace—to the consternation of many white Americans whom the Kremlin sought to cultivate—of the contemporary civil rights movement. In both the image and the accompanying text, the Russians portrayed Soros as the puppet master.

“Soros is named as the architect and sponsor of almost every revolution and coup around the world for the last 25 years. Thanks to him and his puppets USA is thought to be a vampire, not a lighthouse of freedom and democracy,” the website proclaimed. The “oligarch” who sired the U.S. vampire, and whose “slaves spill blood of millions and millions people just to make him even more rich” [sic], had a particular background the Russians highlighted in the very first sentence: Soros is “of Hungarian-Jewish ancestry and holds dual citizenship.”

More than two years later, the president of the United States gave a similar portrayal of Soros, though Trump left Soros’s background unsaid. Soros, Trump said on Friday, Oct. 5, had paid for “professionally made identical signs” in the hands of women objecting to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court justiceship. On Tuesday, he followed up by implying that Soros had stiffed these hired “screamers.” In Trump-like fashion, his accusations were a form of mirror-imaging, as Trump himself had paid for people to support his presidential announcement and denied them payment for months, and he appears to have misunderstood a Fox News guest who spoke sarcastically about Soros paying the protesters.

...The current portraiture of Soros, now ascendant if not dominant online, isn’t interested in that sort of complexity. For the far right, from Russia to central Europe and increasingly, America, Soros is the latest Jewish manipulator whose extreme wealth finances puppet groups and publications to drain the prosperity of the Herrenvolk. This cannot be dismissed as the preoccupation of ignorable fools on the internet, nor as the equivalent of liberal criticism of the Koch Brothers. Instead, the attack on Soros follows classic anti-Semitic templates, grimly recurrent throughout western history, and some of the most powerful geopolitical figures in the world are pushing it. It’s fueled by Soros’s political activism against a revanchist right eager to view the world in zero-sum racial terms that is on the march across Europe, America and beyond.

...Thirty years after the pivotal battle capping the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a pamphlet circulated across Europe claiming that Nathan Rothschild, a London banker and scion of the Jewish mega-financier family, sped from the battlefield to parlay his insider knowledge of the French defeat into a windfall on the London stock exchange. “This family,” charged an author writing under the nom de plume “Satan,” “is our evil genius.”

...The form of conspiracy theories follows their function. Here was a Jewish family whose fortune was said to derive from exploiting European carnage. As Jews, they were considered a foreign presence on the continent, one that had taken advantage of their adopted countries’ naive openness to establish a shadowy power that could determine the fate of nations. Accordingly, European publics would not have to look to their distant autocratic governments for their political disenfranchisement, nor would they have to look to a confusing system of capitalist finance to explain obscene discrepancies in wealth. In place of a systemic critique was a Jewish face. More recently, you can find Rothschild references in the QAnon conspiracy theory, alongside, of course, Soros.

A recurrent theme of 19th-century anti-Semitism is that it finds substantial currency at moments when old regimes appear exhausted and fear about revolutionary dislocation intensifies. A tutor to Russia’s final two tsars demonstrated the utility of using Jews as an omnibus explanation for the anxieties of his age. Jews in Russia endured repression of their civil and economic rights—but they only appeared powerless.

...According to Poliakov, the years between the world wars were a boom time for anti-Semitic forgeries in the United States. There was the fake George Washington missive, warning that the Jews, not the British Army, were the principal danger. And there was a fake Ben Franklin prophesy, forecasting Jewish world domination by 1950 or so. Detectives hired by the anti-Semitic industrialist Henry Ford traveled to Mongolia, of all places, in pursuit of an authentic Hebrew copy of the invented Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Another went “looking for the secret channel through which [Supreme Court Justice and Jew] Louis Brandeis gave his orders to the White House.”

Foreshadowing the present day, the upswing of American anti-Semitism came at the intersection of an immigration panic, an ascendant nativist movement, and fears about foreign-borne internal subversion. As the Bolshevik Revolution spread, so did a cottage industry of paranoiacs connecting it to mainstream American Jewry, just as a later generation of Islamophobes would do to American Islam after 9/11. In 1919, a Methodist minister recently driven from Russia, the Rev. George A. Simons, testified to a Senate subcommittee about the Jewishness of Bolshevism.

Simons, speaking through barely concealed euphemism, told the Senate that he had encountered “hundreds of agitators” in the former St. Petersburg who had come from “the East Side of New York,” meaning the Jewish slum. The typical sentiment of Russians to describe the post-revolutionary arrangement, Simons related, was that “it is not a Russian government, it is a Hebrew government.” But, Simons assured the Senate, he was no bigot: “I am not in sympathy with anti-Semitism. I never was and never will be. I hate pogroms of any type. But I am firmly convinced that this business is Jewish.”

...[It’s] one thing to be a wealthy donor, even an unfathomably wealthy one: American politics, to its cross-ideological abasement, relies upon them, and scrutiny of them is vital for the very open societies Soros promotes. It’s quite another for such an unfathomably wealthy donor to stand as a singular, nefarious explanation for all manner of global political phenomena. A recent ADL study about anti-Semitism on Twitter took particular note of the frequency and virulence of invocations of Soros for “undermin[ing] western civilization, or following a long-standing pattern of Jewish behavior.” The ADL even found far-right warnings that Soros had engineered the lethal white-supremacist march on Charlottesville as a false-flag operation.

After the teenage survivors of the Parkland high school massacre began their demonstrations for gun control, some let the mask slip. One now-suspended “alt-right” account tweeted that it was “@georgesoros at work.” Softer versions of that sentiment are ubiquitous online. One more humorous version came after someone posted a picture of a bald Britney Spears attacking a car during her 2007 meltdown to joke that it was Parkland’s Emma Gonzalez – prompting an apparently elderly woman to tweet that “these children of Satan… are funded by Soros.” At an “alt-right” gathering in New York convened by Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, drunken panelists referred to Soros as the “head of the snake.”

...More recently, after the Kavanaugh confirmation fight, Senator Chuck Grassley stopped just short of validating the accusation that Soros had paid for those protesting Kavanaugh. “I believe it fits in his attack mode that he has, and how he uses his billions and billions of resources,” said the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. Even Rudy Giuliani on Saturday retweeted someone who called Soros the “anti-Christ.” The “evil genius” that “Satan” concocted in 1841 had found its 2018 incarnation.

Nowhere has the attack on Soros been more geopolitically potent, or as clarifying, as in his native Hungary.

...“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us,” [Hungarian strongman prime minister Viktor Orban] said, per a New York Times translation. “Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.” Even a previously sympathetic writer, National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty, said the speech read like “a checklist drawn from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

...This spring, Orban’s government criminalized the assistance of asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants through what it called the “Stop Soros” laws. Ahead of its passage, the Open Society Foundations announced that it would cease operations in Budapest and transfer its local staff to Germany. In July, Netanyahu hosted Orban in Jerusalem and declared him a “true friend of Israel.”

...The U.S. has been better to and for Jews than any other diaspora nation in history. It’s for that reason that many American Jews, particularly those whose white skin affords them access to the highest levels of the American Dream, often diminish the dangers posed by a mass movement comfortable, wittingly or not, with creating a Jewish scapegoat for its political frustrations. There is also a powerful Jewish collective instinct to avoid calling attention to empowered anti-Semitism for fear of provoking it to violence.

Nearly a century ago, as anti-Semitic propaganda backed by powerful white Americans like Henry Ford proliferated, an American Jewish lawyer and civil-rights leader urged his fellow Jews to confront it. “Events have shown that the policy of silence was a mistake. Not only do Ford’s articles appear every week with undiminished virulence, but worse, the Protocols is distributed in every club, placed in every newspaper,” wrote Louis Marshall in 1921. “It has been received by every member of Congress and put in the hands of thousands of personalities. It is the topic of conversation in every living room and in every social sphere.”

Eighteen years later, 20,000 Nazi supporters filled Madison Square Garden to preach their vision of an American Reich. It would not be long, across the Atlantic, before much worse unfolded.

“I’m concerned that the prevalence of conspiracy theories about Soros which paint him as a larger than life, powerful figure has the effect of shrinking that public space where anti-Semitism is not acceptable,” said the ADL’s Tuchman. “If you have fully embraced the notion that there is a powerful Jewish figure manipulating social and political movements around the world to promote his agenda, you’re inching toward the edges of that space where anti-Semitism is acceptable. Soros is a liminal figure in that way.”

[Read Spencer Ackerman’s full piece at The Daily Beast.]

#george soros #antisemitism #white supremacy #long post

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kittyinhighheels · 7 years ago

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so- whats the deal with that 13 reasons why thing anyway ? isnt it like... just an entertainement thing like the others, that ppl can pick to watch or not just like the others, exept that it says "so uh theres real dark graphic stuff in there so know what youre getting into" ? like i genuinely dont get how hating it is different from any other anti rethoric, esp since... literally all medias exept fanmade/free stuff are about making cash ?

Feel honored ´cause I only got on my laptop so I could properly answer you.

My issue with the netflix show 13 Reasons Why

So for anyone who doesn´t know yet, 13 Reasons Why is the netflix adaption of the same-titled book by Jay Asher from 2007.The plot of the book revolves around 16-year-old Hannah Baker, who committed suicide by overdose a while ago. Her classmate, Clay Jensen one day receives a package with seven cassettes, each side numbered from 1 to 13. Clay goes on a nightly trip through the town while Hannah´s voice on the cassettes tells him why she killed herself - and what role he played in it.

In the book, Hannah was more shy and kind of introverted. She was new in town and her only “friend” had just moved away. Then she fell for a guy and put his trust in him, so far as to give him her first kiss. Her trust is crushed when the same guy spreads around the rumor that he was allowed to touch her breasts and make out with her and since we all know, High School is hell and now everyone thinks the new girl is a slut. She becomes an outcast.A little bit of hope blossoms when she becomes friends with two other new students and regularly goes to a café with them to talk about their problems. After a while, their friendship breaks and not only that, but these two friends actually drag her into their own fight and use her to provoke each other. One of them even pushes her status as a slut just to provoke the other. Her trust has now been broken yet again and she´s alone. Again.Her only safe space now is at home. There she can be herself and no one will bully her for something that was only a lie. But one day, she hears a noise outside of her window and gets scared. To prove if her fear is justified, she asks a seemingly nice girl to help her. They find out that one of their classmates followed Hannah home and took pictures of her in her room when she undressed, when she was just sitting there. And even worse, they caught him masturbating under her window. Her only safe space left has now been taking from her.As if that wouldn´t already be horrible, said “nice girl” now also spreads rumors that Hannah is a slut and it starts to affect her in every way. Guys who show interest in dating her only want her sexually and when she goes to a shop, she´s being sexually harassed. She gets more and more depressed and her parents are gone most times so she doesn´t really have anyone who she can talk to. She loses trust in anyone. Clay tries to be nice to her but she´s so far “gone”, she´s so desperate and lonely that she´s scared of trusting him or of him helping her. She has to listen to her old friend being raped as she hides in a closet out of fear. She has to live with the fact that she couldn´t help her and that a car accident she was involved in caused the death of one of her classmates. She can´t take it anymore, so she changes and hopes someone notices. She wants to reach out, so in a class she anonymously asks the teacher if they could talk about suicide, to see if someone - anyone - would catch on that it´s about her and maybe try and help her because she´s too scared to say it herself. But no one does and even if, she´d never know because one of her classmates, the guy she rejected after he hit on her, took away the notes she had in the little bag every one in her class had to give each other compliments and support. Even the poetry she shares with someone she thinks could be a friend, the poetry that shows her vulnerable side, is published by said friend. So even that little support she could have had was taken from her because the dude was butthurt. She has a mental breakdown in the hallway.Hannah starts to think about suicide and she gets so bad that she doesn´t scream for help when she is raped, she just silently cries. Her last hope is supposed to be her counselor but he pretty much victim blames her and tells her to get over it.So she is alone, depressed and has no safe places anymore. Every little attempt at getting help, at reaching out, has brought her ridicule and rejection. Side B of tape 7 is her last word “Thank you” before she dies after she swallowed pills.Clay, shocked about what he heard, sees another girl at school, an old classmate of his, and recognizes all the changes in her Hannah had just talked about on the tapes and decides to run after her to maybe prevent another suicide from happening.

The message of the book was over all that what you do and what you say to someone can affect someone in a lot of ways and at worst, can even cause a snowball effect. Justin´s rumor about Hannah being a slut was the snowball that caused pretty much everything that happened to her afterwards. The sexual harassment, the voyeurism, Alex involving her in his fight with Jessica. Maybe the only things you can´t blame it for was the car accident everything that was with Bryce. But if that one thing hadn´t happened, Hannah might have been fine. Everything after that took a bit of Hannah´s safety, of her happiness and trust. So she killed herself.

I got the book when I was eleven. Bad idea because I had my ´till then worst depressive episode and the book didn´t really help with it. But I loved it, so I read it at least once a year. When I got on tumblr, it saddened me that the fanbase for it seemed so small because the book touched me. I could probably still recite the last verse of “Soul Alone”. Now imagine how happy I was when I heard that a book that influenced a major part of my youth would be made into a netflix show and produced by one of my favorite celebrities. They even talked to psychologists and mental health professionals to make it as good and appropriate as possible because they wanted to spread awareness about the danger of suicide and bullying! They wanted to make a show not only about mentally ill teenagers but also for mentally ill teenagers.

When I watched it, the first thing that confused me was the order of the people on the list and that Clay listened to the tapes over a few weeks. The order of the people had a good reason since she talked about it in the order of when it happened. Clay listened to them in one sitting while walking through the town and being confronted with people and settings that affected Hannah. So I wasn´t really happy about the way they went with that.

The second thing that confused - or more, annoyed - me were the characters. Hannah was rude and way more extroverted. I can´t say how many times I rolled my eyes when she “trapped” Justin in that bus and pretty much played with him. Also her entire suicide was played as a revenge act, since you never saw any of her attempts at really reaching out and you never really saw her getting worse. It glorified suicide as an “in your face!” thing for people who hurt you and made her appearance as a ghost in season two seem like suicide was anything but a long-term, definite solution to a short-term problem.Jenny, the blonde girl who caused the accident and I think was even the one encouraging Hannah to go on a date with Zach, was suddenly black and was called Sheri. Tyler was suddenly a victim when he was actually a voyeurist. Zach was a heartthrob when he harassed Hannah and took away her only real support at school because he was butthurt.

But one of the worst character offenses in my opinion was Courtney. Courtney was the girl Hannah asked for help to catch Tyler taking pictures of her at home. Courtney massaged her and later on told everyone Hannah had a bunch of sex toys and used her for her own popularity. She was the last real straw before Hannah got really bad. She had no real description other than “manipulative attention whore who uses people to gain popularity”. What did they make her? An Asian lesbian. They chose to make the worst and most manipulative girl in this entire story a mix of two minorities. Because that´s definitely the kind of representation you´d want as an Asian lesbian in the USA.

Now to the things that really bothered me about the show itself. As a reminder, everyone involved in the show told the media that their goal was to raise awareness about the consequences of bullying and suicide and that they had talked with professionals to make the show as appropriate and accurate as possible. A show for mentally ill teenagers, not only about them.Every psychologist and professional for mental illness will tell you that showing suicide and rape graphically can be extremely triggering for mentally ill people. Especially graphic suicides only invite copy cats. It´s dangerous and harmful to show it this way and everyone with an ounce of experience in psychology will tell you that.

I read the book prior to the release of the show on netflix. I prepared myself for the rape scenes, I prepared myself for Hannah´s mental breakdown, I prepared myself for Hannah swallowing the pills and dying.

What did I get?

Clay showing Skye´s self harm scars

And Hannah graphically slitting her wrists

I spent the rest of the night rocking myself back and forth scratching my arms because my mind only circled around this scene.

None of these scenes were in the book. Both of these were needlessly added to create shock value and drama. Changing Hannah´s suicide from a drug overdose to her slitting her wrists in a bath tub and bleeding out did not serve any purpose. It was unnecessary and only triggered those who didn´t know it would happen.

“But it has an age rating!”

It´s a show about High School students, specifically mentally ill ones. You really think teenagers won´t watch something about them?

“But it has trigger warnings!”

A usual trigger warning can be for anything from drug abuse to sexual harassment to death. They are so unspecific that the sheer image of Hannah grabbing a bottle of pills and the mention of her suicide could have warranted a trigger warning. It didn´t prepare you for anything. And again, for the book readers it was just a slap in the face because none of us were prepared for this bullshit.

This show doesn´t care about its viewers or about the things they go through. Otherwise they wouldn´t have done this in season one and especially not this “sympathy for the school shooter” bullshit they apparently pull in season two, in a country that on the day the season was released had a school shooting. All they care about is the money.

Also, if you want a taste of its fanbase:

#anti 13rw #anti 13 reasons why #13 reasons why #tw rape #tw suicide #tw self harm #long post #Anonymous

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infectious-awareness · 7 years ago

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Before anything I'd like to give a very special, !!!FUCK YOU!!! to Jeff Sessions... Now I am sure you ladies and gentlemen have all heard the news; Jeff Sessions has rescinded a policy allowing states to handle the laws and prosecution around marijuana within its borders. This cannot stand.... Are we just going to stand by and allow this to happen?!?! WE BEST FUCKING NOT!!! I Want You To Get Mad!!! REAL MAD!!! Do I really have to go over the multiple benefits this plant can provide to society as a whole?! Apparently Fucking So. First let's go over the medical applications of this miraculous plant: -Marijuana slows and halts the production of cancer cells. It's amazing the United States Government even has a patent on cannabis as a treatment for cancer yet lists it as a class one felony substance... -Marijuana reduces the tremors and improves the motor function of Parkinson's patients... FUCKING AMAZING -Marijuana has been proven to reduce the occurrence and severity of epileptic seizures. Many children in the U.S. Really on CBD oil which allows them to live their life with two-three seizures a week as opposed to 12 a day... -Marijuana is used to treat Glaucoma. Left untreated the disease causes excess pressure on the optic nerve which is damaging and leads to blindness. When smoked marijuana relieves intraocular pressure preventing this blinding damage. -Marijuana is used to treat many psychological disorders such as PTSD, Autism, Bipolar Disorder, and anxiety. -Believe it or not marijuana has been shown to improve lung health, reversing the carcinogenic effects of tobacco and increase lung capacity. -Marijuana is Used to reduce the Severity of side effects of extreme treatments for diseases like cancer, hepatitis, and HIV. -Marijuana universally helps with pain management. BUT WAIT! THERES MORE!!! -Legal Marijuana provides a substantial boost to tax revenue. Taxes that fund our schools and welfare programs -Hemp can be manufactured sustainably into biodegradable plastics. Useable in both the packing industries and construction. -Marijuana absorbs carbon dioxide at an exceptional rate, growing vast swaths of hemp for industrial and medical use helps substantially put a dent in our carbon footprint and detoxify the planet. I myself have benefited from medical cannabis, I like to consider myself a marijuana success story. I used to buy into the "anti-drug" propaganda and was a full subscriber to big pharma prescription medications in my youth... by the time I was 18 I had already been on well over a dozen different medications and was suffering from debilitating insomnia, depression, and bipolar disorder. I literally could not function, my moods would swing sporadically throughout the day, I was under a constant sedation from the medication, and my manic episodes would keep me wired and high strung 3-4 days at a time. I was 80lbs overweight, and I couldn't even hold a job because of this instability. When I was 18 I was desperate to find something, anything that could help me, after reading some articles on medical marijuana's success in treating insomnia & depression, and having tried every sleeping pill on the market, I let go of my anti-marijuana prejudice and got a medical card.... It changed my life... every night since I've gotten a full nights sleep... with my sleeping schedule repaired my mood swings began to level out and soon my bi-polar disorder became a fraction of the demon it used to be. I am no longer plagued with hypo-manic episodes, just minor mood swings which are a whole other world of manageability. My depression simultaneously also seemed to dissipate over several months. By month three of smoking i was living a completely different life. I became hyper aware of my health, and changed my diet and exercise regiments, and lost 85lbs over the next year. I was able to hold my first job for over a year and was finally able to enter into my adult life stably. The biggest gift medical marijuana has given to me to me is the eradication of my hellish nightmares... my insomnia began when I was 8 years old... I started getting these nightmares that were extremely lucid, I could feel, taste, touch, everything, even feel pain. Every night or so I'd disappear to another world for what often felt like days... a world filled with horrific demons and ghouls more terrifying than anything I've seen in movies or video games... they'd rip me apart and I'd feel myself get disembowled it was literally the worst period of my life. Every night became hell and I didn't want to sleep anymore... and after several months I seldom did. The nightmares would come in waves, I'd have them for several months, then there would be a week or two I didn't have them. By the age of 18 they had become less frequent but were still very real, even with the decline in frequency my body still found it extremely difficult to shut down and sleep. With the introduction of medical marijuana both problems were solved over night... In addition to getting healthy sleep I began having vivid dreams of a whole different variety. The majority are really intense futuristic dreams typically in a dystopian society(which I will gladly take over ghouls and demons any night). I no longer feel pain in my dreams, nightmares or not, which is the biggest god-sent none of you will ever understand. With the demonic dreamscape behind me, I practically consider every dream a good dream now. A good portion of my family relies on medical marijuana. My mother specifically, suffers from a severe spinal injury which has destroyed several vertebrae and damaged her nerve tissue. The nerve pain is the worst for her to manage, her biggest struggles IS pain management. For years it's been a tough trade, 4-5 hours of impaired mental capacity for 4-5 hours of pain relief; one pill at a time. She too sought an alternative treatment in medical marijuana. Now she uses non-psychoactive CBD and it's the only thing that allows her to get through the day while keeping a clear head. And she is by far not the only person seeking non-mind altering pain management with this medicine. That's one of the beautiful things about medical cannabis, you don't even have to intake the psychoactive THC to receive its benefits. How many cancer patients, epileptics, Parkinson's suffers, individuals managing pain, insomniacs, depression sufferers, and all manor of other people are going to suffer because Jeff Sessions thinks marijuana is "Bad". This is fucked up, I'm not going back to my nightmares, I'm not watching my mother have to pop narcotics every day, and I know my story is not unique. We have to stand up and tell them "We're Not Fucking Taking It Anymore!!!!"

#Jeff sessions #medical marijuana #cannabis #legalize #weed

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shg11 · 7 years ago

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The UNs Philip Alston is an expert on deprivation and he wants to know why 41m Americans are living in poverty. The Guardian joined him on a special two-week mission into the dark heart of the worlds richest nation

Los Angeles, California, 5 December

You got a choice to make, man. You could go straight on to heaven. Or you could turn right, into that.

We are in Los Angeles, in the heart of one of Americas wealthiest cities, and General Dogon, dressed in black, is our tour guide. Alongside him strolls another tall man, grey-haired and sprucely decked out in jeans and suit jacket. Professor Philip Alston is an Australian academic with a formal title: UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

General Dogon, himself a veteran of these Skid Row streets, strides along, stepping over a dead rat without comment and skirting round a body wrapped in a worn orange blanket lying on the sidewalk.

The two men carry on for block after block after block of tatty tents and improvised tarpaulin shelters. Men and women are gathered outside the structures, squatting or sleeping, some in groups, most alone like extras in a low-budget dystopian movie.

We come to an intersection, which is when General Dogon stops and presents his guest with the choice. He points straight ahead to the end of the street, where the glistening skyscrapers of downtown LA rise up in a promise of divine riches.

Heaven.

Then he turns to the right, revealing the black power tattoo on his neck, and leads our gaze back into Skid Row bang in the center of LAs downtown. That way lies 50 blocks of concentrated human humiliation. A nightmare in plain view, in the city of dreams.

Alston turns right.

Philip Alston in downtown LA. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian

So begins a two-week journey into the dark side of the American Dream. The spotlight of the UN monitor, an independent arbiter of human rights standards across the globe, has fallen on this occasion on the US, culminating on Friday with the release of his initial report in Washington.

His fact-finding mission into the richest nation the world has ever known has led him to investigate the tragedy at its core: the 41 million people who officially live in poverty.

Of those, nine million have zero cash income they do not receive a cent in sustenance.

Alstons epic journey has taken him from coast to coast, deprivation to deprivation. Starting in LA and San Francisco, sweeping through the Deep South, traveling on to the colonial stain of Puerto Rico then back to the stricken coal country of West Virginia, he has explored the collateral damage of Americas reliance on private enterprise to the exclusion of public help.

The Guardian had unprecedented access to the UN envoy, following him as he crossed the country, attending all his main stops and witnessing the extreme poverty he is investigating firsthand.

Think of it as payback time. As the UN special rapporteur himself put it: Washington is very keen for me to point out the poverty and human rights failings in other countries. This time Im in the US.

David Busch, who is currently homeless on Venice beach, in Los Angeles. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian

The tour comes at a critical moment for America and the world. It began on the day that Republicans in the US Senate voted for sweeping tax cuts that will deliver a bonanza for the super wealthy while in time raising taxes on many lower-income families. The changes will exacerbate wealth inequality that is already the most extreme in any industrialized nation, with three men Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet owning as much as half of the entire American people.

A few days into the UN visit, Republican leaders took a giant leap further. They announced plans to slash key social programs in what amounts to an assault on the already threadbare welfare state.

Look up! Look at those banks, the cranes, the luxury condos going up, exclaimed General Dogon, who used to be homeless on Skid Row and now works as a local activist with Lacan. Down here, theres nothing. You see the tents back to back, theres no place for folks to go.

California made a suitable starting point for the UN visit. It epitomizes both the vast wealth generated in the tech boom for the 0.001%, and the resulting surge in housing costs that has sent homelessness soaring. Los Angeles, the city with by far the largest population of street dwellers in the country, is grappling with crisis numbers that increased 25% this past year to 55,000.

Ressy Finley, 41, was busy sterilizing the white bucket she uses to slop out in her tent in which she has lived on and off for more than a decade. She keeps her living area, a mass of worn mattresses and blankets and a few motley possessions, as clean as she can in a losing battle against rats and cockroaches. She also endures waves of bed bugs, and has large welts on her shoulder to prove it.

She receives no formal income, and what she makes on recycling bottles and cans is no way enough to afford the average rents of $1,400 a month for a tiny one-bedroom. A friend brings her food every couple of days, the rest of the time she relies on nearby missions.

She cried twice in the course of our short conversation, once when she recalled how her infant son was taken from her arms by social workers because of her drug habit (he is now 14; she has never seen him again). The second time was when she alluded to the sexual abuse that set her as a child on the path towards drugs and homelessness.

Given all that, its remarkable how positive Finley remains. What does she think of the American Dream, the idea that everyone can make it if they try hard enough? She replies instantly: I know Im going to make it.

A 41-year-old woman living on the sidewalk in Skid Row going to make it?

Sure I will, so long as I keep the faith.

What does making it mean to her?

I want to be a writer, a poet, an entrepreneur, a therapist.

Ressy Finley, who lives in a tent on 6th Street in Downtown LA. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian

Robert Chambers occupies the next patch of sidewalk along from Finleys. Hes created an area around his tent out of wooden pallets, what passes in Skid Row for a cottage garden.

He has a sign up saying Homeless Writers Coalition, the name of a group he runs to give homeless people dignity against what he calls the animalistic aspects of their lives. Hes referring not least to the lack of public bathrooms that forces people to relieve themselves on the streets.

LA authorities have promised to provide more access to toilets, a critical issue given the deadly outbreak of Hepatitis A that began in San Diego and is spreading on the west coast claiming 21 lives mainly through lack of sanitation in homeless encampments. At night local parks and amenities are closed specifically to keep homeless people out.

Skid Row has had the use of nine toilets at night for 1,800 street-faring people. Thats a ratio well below that mandated by the UN in its camps for Syrian refugees.

Its inhuman actually, and eventually in the end you will acquire animalistic psychology, Chambers said.

He has been living on the streets for almost a year, having violated his parole terms for drug possession and in turn being turfed out of his low-cost apartment. Theres no help for him now, he said, no question of making it.

The safety net? It has too many holes in it for me.

Of all the people who crossed paths with the UN monitor, Chambers was the most dismissive of the American Dream. People dont realize its never getting better, theres no recovery for people like us. Im 67, I have a heart condition, I shouldnt be out here. I might not be too much longer.

That was a lot of bad karma to absorb on day one, and it rattled even as seasoned a student of hardship as Alston. As UN special rapporteur, hes reported on dire poverty and its impact on human rights in Saudi Arabia and China among other places. But Skid Row?

I was feeling pretty depressed, he told the Guardian later. The endless drumbeat of horror stories. At a certain point you do wonder what can anyone do about this, let alone me.

And then he took a flight up to San Francisco, to the Tenderloin district where homeless people congregate, and walked into St Boniface church.

What he saw there was an analgesic for his soul.

San Francisco, California, 6 December

The Gubbio project at St Boniface in San Francisco. The church opens its doors every weekday at 6am to allow homeless people to rest until 3pm. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

About 70 homeless people were quietly sleeping in pews at the back of the church, as they are allowed to do every weekday morning, with worshippers praying harmoniously in front of them. The church welcomes them in as part of the Catholic concept of extending the helping hand.

I found the church surprisingly uplifting, Alston said. It was such a simple scene and such an obvious idea. It struck me Christianity, what the hell is it about if its not this?

It was a rare drop of altruism on the west coast, competing against a sea of hostility. More than 500 anti-homeless laws have been passed in Californian cities in recent years. At a federal level, Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who Donald Trump appointed US housing secretary, is decimating government spending on affordable housing.

Perhaps the most telling detail: apart from St Boniface and its sister church, no other place of worship in San Francisco welcomes homeless people. In fact, many have begun, even at this season of goodwill, to lock their doors to all comers simply so as to exclude homeless people.

As Tiny Gray-Garcia, herself on the streets, described it to Alston, there is a prevailing attitude that she and her peers have to contend with every day. She called it the violence of looking away.

Coy Catley, 63, in her homeless box made of cardboard sheets on a sidewalk of Tenderloin, San Francisco. Photograph: Ed Pilkington for the Guardian

That cruel streak the violence of looking away has been a feature of American life since the nations founding. The casting off the yoke of overweening government (the British monarchy) came to be equated in the minds of many Americans with states rights and the individualistic idea of making it on your own a view that is fine for those fortunate enough to do so, less happy if youre born on the wrong side of the tracks.

Countering that has been the conviction that society must protect its own against the vagaries of hunger or unemployment that informed Franklin Roosevelts New Deal and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. But in recent times the prevailing winds have blown strongly in the youre on your own, buddy direction. Ronald Reagan set the trend with his 1980s tax cuts, followed by Bill Clinton, whose 1996 decision to scrap welfare payments for low-income families is still punishing millions of Americans.

The cumulative attack has left struggling families, including the 15 million children who are officially in poverty, with dramatically less support than in any other industrialized economy. Now they face perhaps the greatest threat of all.

As Alston himself has written in an essay on Trumps populism and the aggressive challenge it poses to human rights: These are extraordinarily dangerous times. Almost anything seems possible.

Lowndes County, Alabama, 9 December

Aaron Thigpen discusses the poor sewage conditions in Butler County. Improper treatment has put the population at risk of diseases long believed to be extinct in the US. Photograph: Bob Miller for the Guardian

Trumps undermining of human rights, combined with the Republican threat to pare back welfare programs next year in order to pay for some of the tax cuts for the rich they are rushing through Congress, will hurt African Americans disproportionately.

Black people are 13% of the US population, but 23% of those officially in poverty and 39% of the homeless.

The racial element of Americas poverty crisis is seen nowhere more clearly than in the Deep South, where the open wounds of slavery continue to bleed. The UN special rapporteur chose as his next stop the Black Belt, the term that originally referred to the rich dark soil that exists in a band across Alabama but over time came to describe its majority African American population.

The link between soil type and demographics was not coincidental. Cotton was found to thrive in this fertile land, and that in turn spawned a trade in slaves to pick the crop. Their descendants still live in the Black Belt, still mired in poverty among the worst in the union.

You can trace the history of Americas shame, from slave times to the present day, in a set of simple graphs. The first shows the cotton-friendly soil of the Black Belt, then the slave population, followed by modern black residence and todays extreme poverty they all occupy the exact same half-moon across Alabama.

There are numerous ways you could parse the present parlous state of Alabamas black community. Perhaps the starkest is the fact that in the Black Belt so many families still have no access to sanitation. Thousands of people continue to live among open sewers of the sort normally associated with the developing world.

The crisis was revealed by the Guardian earlier this year to have led to an ongoing endemic of hookworm, an intestinal parasite that is transmitted through human waste. It is found in Africa and South Asia, but had been assumed eradicated in the US years ago.

Yet here the worm still is, sucking the blood of poor people, in the home state of Trumps US attorney general Jeff Sessions.

A disease of the developing world thriving in the worlds richest country.

The open sewerage problem is especially acute in Lowndes County, a majority black community that was an epicenter of the civil rights movement having been the setting of Martin Luther Kings Selma to Montgomery voting rights march in 1965.

Philp Alston talks to a resident. Many families in Butler and Lowndes counties choose to live with open sewer systems made from PVC pipe. Photograph: Bob Miller for the Guardian

Despite its proud history, Catherine Flowers estimates that 70% of households in the area either straight pipe their waste directly onto open ground, or have defective septic tanks incapable of dealing with heavy rains.

When her group, Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (Acre), pressed local authorities to do something about it, officials invested $6m in extending waste treatment systems to primarily white-owned businesses while bypassing overwhelmingly black households.

Thats a glaring example of injustice, Flowers said. People who cannot afford their own systems are left to their own devices while businesses who do have the money are given public services.

Walter, a Lowndes County resident who asked not to give his last name for fear that his water supply would be cut off as a reprisal for speaking out, lives with the daily consequences of such public neglect. You get a good hard rain and it backs up into the house.

Thats a polite way of saying that sewage gurgles up into his kitchen sink, hand basin and bath, filling the house with a sickly-sweet stench.

Given these circumstances, what does he think of the ideology that anyone can make it if they try?

I suppose they could if they had the chance, Walter said. He paused, then added: Folks arent given the chance.

Had he been born white, would his sewerage problems have been fixed by now?

After another pause, he said: Not being racist, but yeah, they would.

Round the back of Walters house the true iniquity of the situation reveals itself. The yard is laced with small channels running from neighboring houses along which dark liquid flows. It congregates in viscous pools directly underneath the mobile home in which Walters son, daughter-in-law and 16-year-old granddaughter live.

It is the ultimate image of the lot of Alabamas impoverished rural black community. As American citizens they are as fully entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Its just that they are surrounded by pools of excrement.

This week, the Black Belt bit back. On Tuesday a new line was added to that simple graphic, showing exactly the same half-moon across Alabama except this time it was not black but blue.

blue belt south

It depicted the army of African American voters who turned out against the odds to send Doug Jones to the US Senate, the first Democrat from Alabama to do so in a generation. It delivered a bloody nose to his opponent, the alleged child molester Roy Moore, and his puppetmasters Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.

It was arguably the most important expression of black political muscle in the region since Kings 1965 march. If the previous entries in the graphic could be labeled soil, slavery and poverty, this one should be captioned empowerment.

Guayama, Puerto Rico, 10 December

So how does Alston view the role of UN rapporteur and his visit? His full report on the US will be released next May before being presented to the UN human rights council in Geneva.

Nobody expects much to come of that: the world body has no teeth with which to enforce good behavior on recalcitrant governments. But Alston hopes that his visit will have an impact by shaming the US into reflecting on its values.

My role is to hold governments to account, he said. If the US administration doesnt want to talk about the right to housing, healthcare or food, then there are still basic human rights standards that have to be met. Its my job to point that out.

Alstons previous investigations into extreme poverty in places like Mauritania pulled no punches. We can expect the same tough love when it comes to his analysis of Puerto Rico, the next stop on his journey into Americas dark side.

Three months after Maria, the devastation wrought by the hurricane has been well documented. It tore 70,000 homes to shreds, brought industry to a standstill and caused a total blackout of the island that continues to cause havoc.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/15/america-extreme-poverty-un-special-rapporteur

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nicemango-feed · 8 years ago

Text

Thoughts on Manchester Attack....& Responses that Just aren't Helping

The Manchester terror attack broke my heart, as each and every terror attack does. It chilled me to my core…again.

Image from CNN.com

With the frequency of these attacks, it’s hard to process them all and properly mourn the loss before your attention is diverted to yet another tragedy.

During the time I finished up this very blog post, I heard of deadly attacks in Baghdad and Kabul. It's hard, so hard to take it all in and grasp the magnitude of loss around the world.

My thoughts are with all those who have suffered.

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The Manchester attack targeted children while they were out having fun, enjoying music, enjoying life...

Image from here

It’s those very freedoms that terrorists hate, they abhor those who don’t live in the same ideological cages as them.

I sit here and try to absorb all the fragmented commentary coming from all angles, trying to make sense of this, trying to understand how we can change it for the better. How do we stop this from happening? I don’t know.. because the terrorists motivations seem to lie in a tangled web of things, parts of which each side wants to deny. The most obvious of those is extreme blind faith in an ideology they consider to be infallible.

I look around me, and see there’s nothing new here…

The left though well intentioned, nor the right, theists, nor atheists - no one is hitting notes (on this subject) that deeply resonate with me anymore. It’s pretty much the same tired commentary, the same motions we go through after each terror attack.

“Islam is evil”

“”Nothing to do with Islam”

“Muslims must do more”

“Muslims should not have to apologize for something they have nothing to do with”

“Islam is war”

“Islam is peace”

“Its all about foreign policy”

“Its all about religion”

We really have to do better than this, because neither side on this issue is getting through to the other. Just screaming at each other till we’re blue in the face isn’t going to accomplish anything.

It’s obvious this is a problem that needs to be addressed, denying links to Islam as people shout Allahu-akbar and take lives just doesn't suffice. It’s not helping anyone, least of all muslims.

This isn’t to say that how all muslims practice Islam is hateful, divisive and dangerous...but we must acknowledge that some extreme muslims do take it this far, if we want to start solving this. Of course every community has it’s extremists..but Islam does have a lot more Westboro Baptist equivalents …and too many who are even more extreme than Westboro level.

There is a fundamentalism problem coming directly from the rigid orthodoxy that Islam commands in the 21st century. Our communities can certainly do more to promote diversity and inclusivity…we do fall short there, we’ve got to own it…only then can we begin to tackle it.

All that said though, here’s another thing thats not cutting it; Laying the blame on all Muslims collectively.

This is like me saying portland, Quebec, NYC - white supremacist murders all by you white people. Its just not right to lump innocent people of the same demographic with violent savages who murder people.

In this case in particular, it’s not fair to say Muslims could have, or should have done more as a community…as the bomber, Salman Abedi had been reported to authorities multiple times. There are mixed reports about him being banned from his mosque, so I'm not sure about that. But mosques can always do more to try and root out extremism.

Full story here

With a frightening surge in white supremacist and anti-muslim attacks in this Trumpian era, the polarization amongst us is growing at such an alarming rate...I fear we’ll end up at a point where we have to pick a side between nazis and jihadis. Already people seem to think you can’t care about both…each team trying to emphasize the horrors of ‘the other side’ while trying to downplay or deny the horrors that come from people within their communities.

Full story here

We’ve got to do better, all of us. Looking inwards, is important for all communities, self-critique is how we improve.

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The post terror attack scenario, is sadly our reality more and more often…around the globe. I understand its a moment of panic, anger, high emotion. People aren’t always thinking clearly on any side of the debate. But we have to do better, it’s the only way we can beat this monster. The one thing they want is to divide, disrupt and create chaos, sow hatred... in the days, weeks, months after…it’s something we should not let them have.

There are a lot different types of counterproductive behaviour that emerge right after a terror attack, I feel we can make an already horrendous, painful situation a little more bearable if we refrain from this type of behaviour:

'The Nothing to do with Islam’ chorus - I get it, it’s a reflex to distance either yourself (if you’re muslim) or an already persecuted minority from the worst, most violent people among them. But as all the liberal/muslim defenders of the religion will tell you, Islam is not a monolith. There are many people, majority of muslims in fact who manage to ignore or ‘re-interpret’ the same verses that drive the terrorists to kill. Why then does it all of a sudden become a monolith with boundaries that exclude terrorists when convenient? You simply cannot deny that those verses too come from the same religion. Just a different interpretation…if you start defining ISIS as ‘not real muslims’ you are playing their game. This is essentially what they do to dehumanize muslims that aren’t living up to their barbaric 7th century standards. The defensiveness and the desperation to distance terrorists from the religion that they themselves claim inspires them, makes defenders appear intellectually dishonest or in deep denial. In order to see the whole picture we cannot keep hiding from the fact that religion has a major role to play in religious extremism. There is hatred of music, hatred of women, of LGBT, of non-muslims coming from Islamic scripture, and theres no way you can modernize, reform or improve things if you at the very least don’t acknowledge that this problem exists. Fine…say this is not how you read it, but you can’t deny that the raw material exists for others to interpret in more violent ways.

Sharing selective out of context Quran quotes guy - Nope. If you think you can share selective positive quotes, then don’t forget that people can and will rightfully share selective violent quotes to counter that too. This just looks like dishonesty or incomplete knowledge (which is also an issue, as many muslims are taught a curated version of scripture and often in a language they don't understand, I honestly didn’t know the existence of some of these verses till I did some research on my own…and hence, ‘ex-muslim’...

I’ll make the same point for those who randomly share selective violent Quran quotes in the aftermath of a terror attack…not as a rebuttal to anyone denying violence in scripture…but just putting it out there that ..’look the scripture is violent… this scripture ALL muslims live by is dangerous” - no, this isn’t the time or place for that. I wholeheartedly agree��the scripture is vile, violent and all that. But tying ordinary muslims to these violent words when they may not fully be aware of its meanings, or even know of its existence is just in poor taste when they will likely already face a backlash of anti-muslim sentiment after an Islamic terror attack. I would say at other times, absolutely share this stuff, make muslims aware that this is what it says, and ask them to question if they’d really endorse this stuff. But RIGHT after a terror attack? Not a good idea imo. The bible has some vile violent verses too…we’ve just reached a point where many people don’t take it literally, and I hope we get there for Islam too…but if thats the goal tying *muslims in general* to violent verses in ancient scripture post-terror attack is harmful and counterproductive.

Reminder, for the 'but what about Islam' types, I'm not sharing this to deny or shift blame from the fact that the Quran has equally violent, abhorrent verses that do inspire such horrors. But just to demonstrate that it is not uniquely evil, it is just unique in how seriously it is still taken today by many...unfortunately.

Being blindly narrative driven without any regard for the truth - whether on the left or right, all muslims bad or all muslims good. This can take the vicious Nazi-esque Katie Hopkins form (far more dangerous and sinister of course), or it can take a well-intentioned but dishonest form from a magazine trying to portray muslims in a good light. You might be well intentioned but if you knowingly lie about things (see Cosmo screenshots below), ultimately you’re doing more harm to Muslims than you are good, and also providing fodder to the far right…who will find it easier to dismiss positive stories about muslims because of things like this.

So they seem to know it's a Sikh person at this point...

How then...does this dishonest headline get printed? I mean there might very well be muslim Taxi drivers doing this as well, but juxtaposing it with this picture of a Sikh man, is really misleading!

Jump to Islamophobia concerns community leader - usually a guy being interviewed on TV who actually barely says two words about the horror of this attack before turning it around and making it about him and his community. Come on dude, priorities…yes there will likely be an anti-muslim backlash…i feel you…I get your concerns, I think anyone of muslim background shares those…generally people with brown skin might be fearful, as some non muslims have been killed as well in anti-muslim attacks. So i get it, legitimate concern….but in the aftermath of an attack, the first thing on your mind shouldn’t be the impact this will have on you…have some sympathy for the victims, for the horror their families will be dealing with.

Similarly, on the fliplside theres the 'You can only care about one thing at a time' person - To this individual if you are concerned about a woman’s hijab being violently ripped off at the same time as the attack, you clearly have no regard for the victims of this brutal attack. This seems absurd to me. You can simultaneously express concern for both…because both harm innocent people. To assume there is no real violence being committed against perceived muslims is deeply foolish or deeply sinister…this isn’t about a few mean words hurled at muslims. This is about pregnant women being kicked till they lose their babies, this is about innocent people being killed. Their lives are no less valuable than those who went to the concert. You can and should express concern about both, of course one of these is not a large scale terrorist attack so one is more pressing and urgent, but this doesn’t mean that anyone expressing concern for both cares any less about the victims of the actual bombing. It just means they are looking at the bigger picture and concerned both about longer term as well as immediate effects. Sad this has to be explained, but there are many 'skeptical takes' out this week saying the victims of the bombing take a backseat if u care about anti-muslim sentiment rising during this attack. Its not one or the other, this is tribalism, plain and simple. And until we stop making it about us vs. them…and see that it is a cyclical problem where hate feeds hate...and that far right anti-muslim hate also fans the fires of Islamism, we won’t be able to combat it.

The niqabi who decides to wear a grenade t-shirt on TV - ok this is rather specific…but i’m referring to a real fucking person who thought it was a good idea to be on TV and be interviewed about radicalization in the muslim community while wearing a black t-shirt that spells love in fucking *weapons*.

At first i thought it was a photoshop job.. but sadly not...See video here

What kind of a person thinks thats a fucking good idea..? I mean of course Tommy Robinson was all over that. I don’t think it necessarily says anything about her sympathies or affiliations, as it appears to be a widely available

t-shirt,

but I mean the optics of this on a hipster kid and on a niqabi talking about extremism on TV after an *islamic* *terror* *attack* are completely different. Of course people are going to draw conclusions about what she was thinking. It might very well be that she foolishly thought it was a good ironic msg about peace, love and being anti violence or something…but fuck...it does not come across like that. Terrible terrible idea. NOT HELPING.

'Hashtag Terror attack you say?!...Buy my books because I generally talk about Islam & stuff' person -

Seriously...don’t be that person…don’t plug your non-specific stuff using a terror attack that took many lives. Of course some content is genuinely helpful and some content has been created as a specific response or commentary to this attack. That’s not what i’m talking about… it’s perfectly ok and also necessary for us to have access to different commentary and viewpoints after an attack. It’s how we process and form our opinions. This very piece is that… I’m talking about unrelated things that people are plugging using the hashtag and all. Don’t do that. That’s really in poor taste.

Projecting negative intent on anyone that’s visibly muslim - Don’t be like Molyneux, probably a good rule in general.

(This is from the London attack, but the point remains.)

Whining about how people express their grief - Im sorry but people cope in different ways... are you that miserable of a person that you cannot let people heal in the ways that suit them? Coming together in groups, singing, feeling part of a community can feel powerful....and unite us at a time we feel so helpless otherwise. It can make us feel like we're doing something at least. Expressing ourselves through music and song is one of the things jihadis hate... its why they attack concert halls ffs. Don't be the guy that piles on to that. "Liberals just sing while the terrorists bomb us" - right cuz the singing is how they specifically plan to combat bombing. Liberals would go to battle ISIS armed with Jon Lennon songs I'm sure.

I mean can people seriously have a problem with this kind of thing?

Goosebumps! The amazing moment Manchester crowd joins in with woman singing Oasis - Don't Look Back in Anger after minutes silence http://pic.twitter.com/Cw4mOq8yde

— Josh Halliday (@JoshHalliday) May 25, 2017

Is this not a valid & beautiful unifying, powerful response to human suffering? I don't understand the pettiness...

But What about [Name other Tragedy] - This isn't a contest, human suffering isn't a contest, please don't try to negate one tragedy by saying another deserves more attention. Yes some things get more air time than others, sometimes because it's closer to home, other times because of some aspects of the story. I wish i knew how to insure that all tragedies got equal attention, but this doesn't happen in the real world...so please don't take away from other horrific acts because the one you're talking about got less coverage.

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I’m sure there’s a ton of more examples of unhelpful behaviour… feel free to add your observations too, in the comments below. But I just felt I had to put this out there after seeing so many cringeworthy takes, making an already tragic situation worse.

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