#migration debate

[townpostin]

Assam CM Raises Alarm Over Demographic Shifts in Northeast and Jharkhand

Himanta Biswa Sarma Calls for Action Against Alleged Infiltration, Proposes New Laws BJP leader highlights concerns about changing population dynamics and their impact on tribal communities during Jharkhand visit. RANCHI – Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has sparked controversy with his recent statements on demographic changes in Assam and alleged infiltration in Jharkhand. During a…

[rodaportal]

European Immigration Policies: A Complex Quandary

🌐 Explore the intricacies of European immigration policies! From France's political dynamics to Germany's stance and transformative EU reforms, grasp the complexities shaping the continent's approach. 🤔💬

Join the conversation and stay informed! Check out our insightful YouTube video for an in-depth analysis: 🎥✨

[fraternum-momentum]

At least your face is hidden.

alt ver here: ♡

bonus:

and that's basically how i got the idea.

[nicosraf]

The weird thing about the debate on Israeli's indigenousness is that "indigenous" doesn't mean... you're From somewhere. You can stop being indigenous; you can stop being indigenous while still existing in the place your ancestors were born. "Indigenous" isn't that you have the memory of belonging to a place or notice little cultural things in your family that tie into your ancestral homeland. I mean, there's a reason we don't call British people in Britan indigenous.

Indigenousness is about perpetual opposition to settler colonialism, which is about the complete uprooting of a pre-existing culture and forcing that land to accommodate an extractivist, export economy. That's what it is. It's not about being from a place or even having a """tie to the land.""" (The "tie to the land" is definitely an element of indigenousness but it's really just a romanticized simplification of indigenousness — a simple answer for why indigenous people are at the frontline of environmental movements.)

When the Spanish came to Mexico, they worked with the noble Nahua people to de-indigenize them. They did this by converting them to Catholicism, teaching them European writing (Latin) and academics, and relying on the Nahua nobility to help enforce the new political system. Fransicans are usually credited with converting Mexico to Christianity, but the ones who did most of the work were the young, Nahua "niños del monasterio" who marched into the villages and burned the idols of the gods — of both their own and other indigenous communities. (Nahua soldiers are credited with being the ones who helped the Spanish conquer the rest of Mexico's native people).

Indigenous/mestizo scholar Chimalpahin wrote about the history of the "Aztecs" by calling every Nahua god a demon, by positioning the Spanish like a good development and by arguing his specific Nahua city was better than the other by appealing to Spanish sentiments. ("But maybe he was just speaking to the Spanish!!!" He wrote in Nahuatl for presumably a Nahua audience.) (Academics don't agree on whether to call him indigenous).

"Chimalpahin and the noble Nahuas were violently forced into assimilating into Spanish nobility; you are sick for trying to argue that they weren't indigenous anymore." I'm not arguing that they weren't, but they were players in de-indigenizing Mexico, and it's important that it was forced.

De-tribalization and de-indigenization are always violent and ugly; you don't lose your indigenousness, usually, because you're evil. Chimalpahin and the noble Nahuas were still victims and horribly traumatized. They were also enforcers of de-indigenization.

Anyway, I'm mestizo and have ties to central Mexico and feel a sense of belonging there, at times. I'm not indigenous to it though. The memory of any indigenousness in my family is just a memory now. We visit, and I eat so so many poblano peppers. But we've detribalized, become borderline settlers by participating in capitalism, lightened our skin through generations, probably intentionally (many Mexicans have heard the phrase that we have to "better our race"). If I wanted to actually reconnect, it would be a lot of work; any reconnecting indigenous person can tell you how much work it is.

I know people get really prissy about how "You can't compare Israelis to white European settlers in America because we actually have a connection to the land!!!! We are actually from there!! >:/ some of us are not even white!"

Well let's think of the majority brown mestizo (mixed) population of Mexico. Are they indigenous because they might have "ties to the land" and because they have lineage from it?? Maybe they were once, but for the majority now — no. Without a mass effort to oppose settler colonialism and reconnect, mestizos are not indigenous and might never be again, no matter how much of their pre-colombian culture persists in our quieter traditions and language. And the Mexican state is happy to co-opt aesthetic representations of indigenousness, to talk about our glorious "Aztec" ancestry, while actively hurting indigenous populations.

So assume some, or lets say all!, Israelis have every possible connection to the land (lets say they love the olive trees and cry over the murder of all the Nile crocodiles), maybe they're visibly non-white, maybe they can trace their lineage to the exact spot where they stand. But if they're on the side of a settler colonial, capitalist state (say it was even forced on them!! say they were even made to move there!!! say they are like the Nahua nobles) — how indigenous are you?

How much longer will you remain " indigenous " ???

[tmmyhug]

i haven't checked in on this blog in a bit how is the meme calendar thing going

its chugging along! im gonna actually make it at the end of the year but heres what i got so far if anyone wants to pitch in. some of them im not sure about. like idk if girl dinner properly migrated from tik tok to tumblr. and i dont know what to call the surge of destiel breaking news memes in july bc that wasnt their origin, they just suddenly got more popular ? dunno

[greetings-inferiors]

Oh my god Twitter users now have a limit on how many posts they can SEE

HOW MANY THEY CAN SEE

For verified users it’s 6000 per day

For unverified accounts, that’s 600 per day

If you’re a new account, that’s

300 per day

Elon did it again, and this time I unironically think this kills it.

You also can’t see ANYTHING without logging in, which killed the website for me personally

Once again, the reasoning is AI and data scraping 😎(kill me)

[bopinion]

2024 / 37 - Belated vacation edition

Aperçu of the week

“Never start to stop and never stop to start!”

(Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman scholar, writer, philosopher and politician)

Bad News of the Week

Poverty and a lack of prospects as well as climate change and a lack of livelihoods are the most common reasons for migration. This is an understandable consideration: those who see no future for themselves (any more) can either resign themselves or set off in search of one somewhere else. Leaving your home country is never easy, so such a move can also be seen as the willpower of someone who won't give up.

Now there are many developed countries that even have a need for immigration. Germany, for example, has a shrinking population due to low birth rates. At the same time, many baby boomers will soon be retiring - so there is less working population and more to care for. A delta that could be closed with immigration. So it's actually a win-win situation that benefits everyone.

Germany does not exactly have the image of a classic immigration country. So anyone who is not a persecuted asylum seeker, but perhaps even a sought-after skilled worker, will think about where to build their future. Potential migrants cite the difficult language, complex bureaucracy and lack of a welcoming culture as the main reasons for not choosing Germany. We cannot change the language, but a reduction in formalities and more openness to the world would also do us good as a society.

I therefore react with incomprehension to the current behavior of the conservative CDU/CSU. They are adopting the pejorative rhetoric of the right and are raging without sense or reason against a supposed emergency situation at the borders caused by an increasing flow of irregular migration - which does not exist to this extent in Germany any more than it does in the USA. An ultimatum from this largest opposition party to the ruling coalition, which it was even prepared to take up constructively, was finally declared a failure just in time for the general debate in the German parliament Bundestag. In this debate, CDU/CSU parliamentary group leader Friedrich Merz insists on the rejection of refugees at the border. Despite all legal concerns and criticism from neighboring countries.

Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz argues against this: “There is no country in the world with a shrinking working population that has economic growth. That is the truth with which we are confronted”. And “We are a country that offers protection to those who are politically persecuted and that is in our constitution and we are not putting that up for debate”. However, he also concedes that openness to the world does not mean that anyone who wants to can come: “We must be able to choose who comes to Germany.”

So the door to talks is still open. Even if only with vague hints instead of a concrete plan on how immigration could be managed for the benefit of all. However, as long as the conservatives bask in good poll ratings and believe it cannot leave populism to the extreme parties, they will refuse to cooperate out of self-interest until at least the next general election. And we will once again fail to come up with a constructive, forward-looking concept for migration. Which we actually urgently need.

Good News of the Week

Taylor Swift and I agree. Elon Musk and I do not. So it should be clear what I'm talking about: the upcoming presidential elections in the USA. Or rather, the televised debate between the two candidates last week. Because it clearly went to the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, as even the otherwise barely objective right-wing populist broadcaster Fox News admits. The corresponding polls can be averaged out at two thirds to one third.

On the one hand, Donald Trump delivered his usual ghost train of doom-mongering, brazen lies, self-praise and bad humor. If he were to lose, there would be a third world war. The one between Russia and Ukraine, on the other hand, would never have happened in the first place. Thanks to him, NATO would be strong again, the pandemic would have been overcome superbly, the economy would be running smoothly and the whole world would take the USA seriously. The Democrats, on the other hand, if not their current vice president personally, would bring millions of migrants from Latin American mental institutions into the country to change gun laws, abort fracking even after birth, eat the cats off African-Americans and tax jobs. Or something like that - at times it was difficult to follow what he was saying.

On the other hand, Kamala Harris gave a solid performance. She came across as factual, credible, confident and self-assured. Yes, at some points one would have wished for more factual content than pathos, but that was not the point. In the run-up to the event, a majority of Americans had explicitly wished to learn more about the candidate. Who ultimately remained rather pale as Vice President. And who had to manage the tightrope act of simultaneously selling her previous performance well and embodying a new beginning. She has managed this reasonably well. And my hopes have risen that we could once again scrape past the abyss on November 5 instead of falling into it. I'm curious to see how the vice-presidential candidates' debate goes the week after next - I'm assuming that it could be entertaining instead of just weird.

Personal happy moment of the week

I had another great time with great people in Québec this week. Thank you!

I couldn't care less...

...that Google has been fined billions in the European Union. We simply have legislation that attempts to control dominant market positions and enable healthy competition in the interests of consumers. I think that's fine in principle.

It's fine with me...

...that BioNTech is now also launching an mRNA vaccine against lung cancer. After all, it was the German company's aim from the outset to use messenger ribonucleic acid to combat this cruel disease, which is the second most common cause of death in humans. This could be nothing less than a medical breakthrough.

As I write this...

...Germany is approaching the last state election of the year. This time it's Brandenburg's turn. Where the ruling Social Democrats could succeed in the last few meters to deprive the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland / Alternative for Germany) of what they thought was a certain victory. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for that.

Post Scriptum

After 28 years, the original German internet search engine MetaGer is shutting down. This makes it older than Google, but it has never been able to compete with it. As Yahoo is ending its involvement as an advertising partner without official justification, one of the longest-lived German Internet projects is now being discontinued. However, I have to admit that I have never used it.

[rainingincale]

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[gar-a-ash]

Yesterday's training session was a comedy of errors but I figured out some stuff!

-First, if the flirt pole is involved Tassie doesn't care who's on the other end of the leash. Buddy and I swapped back and forth and it didn't matter, Tassie wanted that cotton rope

-Second, if I'm going to do this maybe don't do it when it's insanely hot out and let my husband know NOT to play Frisbee with her twenty minutes before I'm supposed to do a highly physical training session

-Third, I forgot that Tassie has never really liked the wedge, and somehow the thought never crossed my mind that going from super-high-value flirt pole to incredibly-low-value bite wedge would be a bad fucking idea lmao

In the end the training session was NOT very productive but I'm glad I recorded it because I'm seeing a bunch of mistakes I'm making. For one, Tassie is insanely strong for her size and was absolutely dragging my buddy around no problem so I need to let her anchor herself better. I did want Tassie to drag forward a little bit to fight for that flirt pole but not quite that much. Also, when she does "win" it I am not letting her have it for long enough and that combined with the heat was a bit demotivating for her. We'll do a makeup session when it cools down later this week. Also, if I am going to work her in this kind of heat I need to hose her down beforehand, not wait until she's gasping for air.

For the bite wedge, I'm either going to have to try to figure out a way to make it more valuable for her or just use the sleeve instead. It's been long enough that I forgot she's never liked the wedge and has always half-assed bit it. She was doing full mouth bites but would immediately release either partially to breathe or entirely because she just hates holding it. Might have to see about getting a different kind of bite pillow. Also, I should have stopped the session a lot earlier instead of trying to tease her into being more invested: she just wasn't feeling it yesterday and I knew it but coordinating with other people is super difficult and I didn't want to waste my buddy's time. Next time I'll pay more attention to her body language about certain stuff. Also flirt pole last. She was fixating on that even when it WAS well out of her sight.

Oh well, learned some things and the things I fucked up aren't major! I'll have to see if next time I can do better.

[sadsongsandwaltzes]

This does bring forth a question about the worth of remaining connected to the mother country or land of origin, as we understand it.

Does it matter to care about the country (as a nation) your ancestors came from when you have no stake in the game? And really, does a specific chunk of land and the governing forces on that land really matter, considering throughout history borders have shifted, governments have changed, people have migrated?

Do you believe you can uphold the legacy and culture of your ancestors regardless of the piece of land on which you stand?

[whiskeyswifty]

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[meezer]

"calling ben shapiro gay is homophobic" he is ACTIVELY spouting racist, homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic rhetoric, day in an day out, and you're worried about being a good person to him.

[trifolium-aries]

I LIVED BITCH

[supersparkeyart]

An art dump! My art style has improved a lot over the past few years. :)

Digital Comms are currently closed, but I’ll probably have them up in a week or two!

[fizzyfishepicgaymer]

i love how tumblr is like so much more chill than twitter that's why I love it here:3