The Finalists for the TOP 100 women of the year have been announced! The Awards this year have highlighted 100 of the most inspirational women on the Planet, (as you can read below,) but who is on the list of the TOP 100 Women of the Year and what are their achievements?
Rwanda’s first Professional Women’s Darts player, she is also only the 8th woman to hit a score of over 100 points in one round in the East African regional Women’s professional darts scene
Samantha Miller
This year, Samantha lost over 27 pounds (12KG) in weight through a combination of Zumba, Circuit Training and dieting
Alinta Minjarra
Australia’s first professional female Aboriginal BMX rider, she recently came 37th in the Northern Australia regional BMX open Championship
Isabella Lorca Ramirez
Isabella has self-published over 100 poems online, the most poems self-published online of any woman in Southern Ecuador
Ramineh Akhtar
The first Afghan woman to host a temporary photography exhibition consisting entirely of pictures of Afghan Women’s vaginas in a Town Hall in Bremen, Germany
Mirlande Petion
One of Haiti’s few trans female Voodoo Priests, she has been responsible both for warding off over 10 evil spirits this year, more than any other trans female Priest since 2018, and for challenging prejudices against women in the Voodoo industry in Haiti
Safeta Bajrić
Leading Bosnian period awareness influencer. She has posted over 3000 tweets this year discussing how difficult periods are for women
Perveen Ghulam
The first Afghan woman to open an OnlyFans account, she has made over $5000 since arriving in Toronto, Canada, after fleeing Afghanistan through chain migration three years before the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan
Lily Davis
Lily went through a really difficult period of mental health this year and is also Black
Wendy Huang
One of Hong Kong’s leading (and only) young activists under 21 advocating for asylum for Afghan refugees in Hong Kong, she held a one woman and ten men protest where she sat in the road in a Hong Kong suburb and managed to stop traffic for 15 minutes
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ON THE THIRD WORLD CITYSCAPE - ABOUT GUATEMALA CITY 🇬🇹
Spent some time in Guatemala City. It isn’t a very interesting city but it is a good example of what an average Central American / Third World city looks like. A thread about the common features of these kinds of cities 🧵
When you fly in above, I don’t want to say the place looks like slum but it does look sort of the next step-up from a slum. Just a sea of corrugated iron roofs. These kinds of cities are not hugely appealing from above. It looks visibly ramshackle
There are whole areas of the city that you “just don’t go”. “Aye aye aye… es muy peligroso” you will be warned. “We don’t go there”. This threat is a little exaggerated, you can walk more places than people say you can, but it is also true that there are places you shouldn’t
Another day in upside down world where someone uses an example that demonstrates the exact opposite opposite of what they are trying to argue to argue because they don’t know anything about anything
r/LegalAdviceUK is a reddit subreddit where people ask for legal advice about their problems. Because of the levels of dysfunction in Britain (AKA ‘The Yookay’) today they often read as parody. Here is a thread of some of the more absurd recent posts
“Caste-based discrimination at my workplace”
“One of my councillors is campaigning to be elected in a completely different country”
ON STUPID HIGH CRIME LEVELS IN A ‘TOTAL MESS’ COUNTRY LIKE GUATEMALA 🇬🇹
When you visit a ‘Total Mess’ Central American country like Guatemala or Honduras, formerly El Salvador, you get a lot of people spontaneously materialising out of the aether to tell you “don’t go outside in the cities they aren’t safe” “don’t walk anywhere at all it isn’t safe” “don’t go out at night there are dual machete-wielding werewolves on the streets” etc. This danger is a bit exaggerated on a personal level, I often find these claims of danger exaggerated anyway, if you are a moderately sized male you will be basically fine walking around many slightly dangerous places at night. Walk with a swaying gorilla gorilla gait so banditos know you are the big bossman, make shrieking gorilla noises to ward them off too if you want, no problem. Obviously though the slums, barrios, favelas etc, yes you would be retarded to go into. Really just needs a good spider sense to intuit where is it and isn’t okay to go.
Either way, it is true there is a lot of crime. You do think, how is there this much crime? It isn’t even like in the west, Yookay, were crime is overlooked for asinine human rights reasons. What exists in a place like Guatemala is a special type of state that ‘some’ have called the ‘Mafia-Corporation Complex’. This is a kind of state where corruption has become so endemic that gangs are basically intertwined with the structure of the state - they are almost an extension of the state itself because they are so enmeshed in its political patronage networks that the state’s formal institutions (customs, immigration, judiciary, police etc) become penetrated, manipulated and co-opted. Rule of law is weak and impunity is high so gangs function as a kind of parallel state structure.
What is the ‘corporation’ part here? In a ‘Total Mess’ country like Guatemala crime-groups will run extortion, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, illegal logging, mining, money laundering, whatever etc. through legitimate businesses. Legitimate businesses (or hybrids) facilitating that money-laundering then obtain government contracts through corrupt channels and / or get kickbacks for serving as fronts. This is de facto state capture (where state institutions serve private illicit interests rather than public good and governance is undermined) which vis-a-vis crime results in a huge spike in violence & insecurity (where criminogenic markets incentivise high homicide rates, arms proliferation and the formation of gangs to control competing territorial claims).
The high levels of gang violence then have downstream effects across society - in the creation of a culture of crime among more ‘normal people’ that is both more incentivised and less commonly prosecuted (on top of the regular incentives that exist already) and in actual physical space where physical territory disputes encourage more crime. In Guatemala some of these gangs are even transnational and associated with the Mexican cartels which leads to state capture by international networks of interests and violence; everything all just so entangled and entrenched that unless you ‘have the balls’ the inducements are really not there to undertake the thankless task of dismantling the ‘Mafia-Corporation Complex’. You would have to upset a lot of people *and* be immune to bribes, threats of violence and fake legal prosecution yourself to begin to fix it.
THE POPULIST EFFECT TURBO-CHARGED
When you have a country that is this captured almost all popular politics becomes about fighting crime and corruption. Guatemala is interesting in this way in that it doesn’t have long-standing political parties. Almost every Guatemalan president since the country’s democratic transition in 1985 post civil war has come to power with a different political party - and that party usually collapses or fades soon after leaving office. This is because almost every party comes to power on a populist pledge to defeat crime and corruption - unlike the previous party that promised that - and then immediately fails in its pledge to defeat crime and corruption. Then the next new party promises to defeat crime and corruption and the cycle continues. Actually a lot of the parties making these pledges are corrupt to begin with, have crime ties to begin with, so it isn’t like they are all Bukele-style noble crusaders who fail because they encounter institutional obstacles.
One example - Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales (2016 - 2020), a political ‘outsider’ former much-loved comedian who campaigns on the slogan ‘not corrupt, not a criminal’. Morales rides a wave of populism to defeat the ‘corrupt establishment’. Soon afterward it transpires that Morales’ family is corrupt, that Morales himself was getting kickbacks, taking illegal donations, that he tried to expel an independent UN commission on corruption in Guatemala because it considered recommending removing his legal immunities as president etc.
Many such cases, the cycle just continues…
The UN Commission (CICIG) was incredibly popular domestically and had succeeded in significantly reducing corruption levels in Guatemala. Morales expelled it from the country for abuses of power and overreach in who it (probably rightly) said needed to be prosecuted (ie Morales)