I don't actually know what the difference is between the two, I just needed
a blog introduction for today. We are living in times of horrible
injustice out there. One example is our treatment of asylum
seekers. For those of you not playing along at home, Australia is
notorious for not wanting to share its resources with those seeking shelter and
protection from discrimination and harm overseas. They tend to regard
these people as queue jumpers, and welfare wasters. Such is our wanton
disregard of them, we voted in a comically bad (almost evil) conservative
government, because the mainstream Australian public didn't like hearing that
people were arriving on boats to the country to seek asylum. So instead,
this new government now intercepts boats in international waters and seeks to
return them back to where they came, against international rules, and the
agreement on refugee rights that Australia is a party to. The Navy does
all the dirty work under claims of national security, and nothing gets reported
to the media. So the boats are still coming, it's just that nobody can
report on it. What fools the public are. Instead of treating asylum
seekers with humanity onshore, we put them in detention centres in other
countries, where guards routinely abuse and mistreat these people who have
already suffered great amounts. So they're left to suffer more, and their
mental illnesses pile up and they commit suicide, go on hunger strikes to protest,
and harm other prisoners. That's what they are, they're not being
processed. They become prisoners almost indefinitely, as they're lost in
the bureaucracy of a government that does not care about them, and the public
is unmoved by their plight either. A few of them have died in captivity,
and we're now hearing stories about the guards forcing female prisoners to
shower naked so they can be offered hot water. This is barbaric, and our
government and wider public have the audacity to call these people the ones
breaking the law? Disgusting hypocrisy.
Another example of crazy injustice on a global scale is the new decision from
President Obama to relax the rules surrounding drone strikes on civilian
populations on Syria and Iraq. Previously, the order was that drone
strikes would never be allowed unless there was an absolute certainty that no
civilians would be harmed (even though many still died, but yeah whatever it
takes to help you sleep at night), but now they are just allowing drone strikes
without that consideration. So what, they're actively treating civilians
as collateral damage now? That's so sick. And the public is saying
that ISIS or ISIL or whatever the media buzzword acronym of the day is are
deliberately using civilian human shields ala Hamas in Palestine and what
not. Even if that is the case, that's no excuse to deliberately target,
or even accidentally kill civilians in warfare. If you're a civilian in one of
these places, it's most likely that you don't even know you're living next to
one of these monsters, and then all of a sudden your entire family gets blown
up, while some idiots halfway across the world with no understanding of the
planet outside of their narrow viewpoint will justify it by saying it was your
choice, or that you must have known. These are dark times.
And I'm still tired today. I don't want to wake up. Not now, not
ever. Things don't seem to be making much sense. Has humanity as a
whole taken a turn for the worse? Or has this all happened before and it's
going to all happen again? We never seem to learn. There's too much
going on at the moment. I'm having a tough time focusing. Maybe
people expect too much. It's time to get a move on.
Next week will be an even shorter week for me, so probably won't get that much
time to blog much. Wow, it's actually October and I have not commenced
the blog intro/retrospective, but I will get a move on with that shortly.
It'll be nice to have it out of the way by the end of this year if that's
possible.
Damn, things are getting busy!
Joaquin out.
