Here’s the thing about the UCU strikes and the fight in the UK about the admission of refugees: both are symptomatic of a wider problem with broken politics where saying one thing and doing the opposite is so completely normalised that there’s almost no point in calling it out. Our current political leadership depends on us being too distracted and overwhelmed to hold them to account, so that they can make one claim in Parliament, another at a press conference, and do something else entirely, without ever facing any meaningful consequence.

So two years ago I was getting ready to spend the month of April on a fellowship in California, and planned to take a weekend trip to see friends in Seattle. Against my better judgement, I bought tickets from @AmericanAir. When Covid hit, they refused a refund. They gave me a credit that expires tomorrow, which I have obviously been unable to use because when the hell would I have been overseas for a protracted period of time in the last few years?

This image has been circulating heavily this year, mostly in posts marking Juneteenth. But it’s not quite what it looks like.

https://twitter.com/calamity_jt/status/1274041814987620352

In the context it’s being used, it seems like a reference to Africans who jumped from ships to escape from a life in bondage. That’s a powerful image.

This was probably not what I should have spent the last couple hours on but here’s a visual representation of the world for Jewish refugees after the Evian conference in 1938. Because saying “32 countries” doesn’t really convey the scope of the refusal. Red are the countries that were directly represented at Evian. Orange are the colonial territories of those countries. Dark blue is the USSR; black and dark grey are Germany, its allies, and their respective colonies.