The very best view of the available evidence in the ICE sterilization story is that one rogue doctor w/a history of Medicare fraud routinely chose the most expensive option w/o obtaining informed consent from women in ICE custody.
This is what we used to call a "scandal"
2/ I know ppl have had the best intentions but IMO it's not helpful to go straight to talking about a Trump/Miller scheme or some kind of organized plot worthy of genocide charges in The Hague. At base, this was one greedy doc who knew no one would care. Don't prove him right!
3/ This is not a Trump thing. This could have, and indeed did, happen under Obama, GW Bush, or Clinton--all of whom presided over mass immigration detention--and there's nothing stopping it in a Biden administration. It is very important to me that you understand this.
4/ Medical care in ICE facilities is baseline awful, but find me much better in any women's prison. This is the cruel, sadistic reality of our carceral state. Whether ICE knew what this doctor was doing or not, I'd really appreciate it if we could frame it accordingly
5/ The horror of the reality of this story is already real. Shrugging off non-consensual life-altering reproductive surgery--not only hysterectomies!--on migrant women (or blaming Russia somehow) is doing nothing to help, and quite a lot to harm
6/ There is already a serious campaign going to minimize this story just bc it didn't match the breathless scope that some people (not including the whistleblower herself) had been imputing upon it.
Surely you value these lives more than that. I really hope you do.
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Me, a very clever human: write a @alyankovic parody in the form of a 15th century madrigal about the collapse of FTX and the crypto market
*two seconds later*
#OpenAI: alas tis a lamentable day, the visions of riches have become mere wishes, etc
A notably less weird Al here but otherwise am I the only one who thinks this is all kind of terrifying
I will not print it here but it cheerfully spit out an '80s party rap anthem denying the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust just because I asked it to.
The word "orgy" was consistently censored out of my prompts though so I guess we're looking out for what really matters
N. B.: the author of this fascist manifesto is not some Roman statue "Western chauvinist" account with 76 followers. He is the senior editor of the closest thing the American right has to a journal of record.
"save the country"
"rebuild and in a sense re-found"
"getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it"
"compromise with the left is impossible"
when I say this is fascism I mean this literally, it is literal fascism
Very few people outside the system know this, but you need to:
US asylum law knowingly & intentionally requires the deportation to certain death of people who have been on the wrong side of the criminal legal system.
First: I didn't know her, but this is the only publicly available news re: the murder of Melissa Nunez--and more importantly, her life. She was, among other things, a determined advocate who loved horses and traveling and dreamed of living in Puerto Rico
From information available online, I gather she was convicted on charges brought from defending herself against anti-trans violence. This conviction constituted an "aggravated felony," a class of offenses which bar someone from receiving asylum.
This @ similar questions from the @MarshallProj sheriffs survey linked below get to one of the most fundamental problems holding back progress today: a belief that past (white) immigrants had it harder & had to do more to "earn" a place than today's. It's exactly backward
It's only human to want to believe that your ancestors were better and smarter and worked harder than today's immigrants, because that kind of generational progress is such a fundamental part of the golden era American immigrant story. Which is to say the *white* immigrant story
But the reality is that it was hardly any trouble at all to immigrate before 1965--& absolutely no effort before 1921--& the system had nothing at all to do with today's. We are in NO WAY doing anything to make it easier now, only much much harder
Would you be surprised to learn that a Presidential pardon doesn't prevent someone from being deported for a drug offense?
Of course pardons for federal marijuana possession convictions are the right thing to do, but it is largely meaningless for immigration purposes and the real harm has come from the wide range of MJ-related offenses not touched by today's order
Anyway, whether by intent or by accident Congress exempted those convicted of controlled substance and domestic violence offenses from being saved from deportation by a state or federal pardon. It was one of the first weird little bits of imm law I noticed when I first started