Whiners, whiners, whiners everywhere in this country. In a society there are women of all sorts (mainly “victim” activists and self-serving feminists), hypocritical black folks, self-promoting people of the Jewish faith, and I even see television commercials whining about “racism” against Asians, when they are really saying is stop whining about us just because we’re smarter than you. We also have to tolerate the whines of “nonbinary” people, who think it is “disrespectful” if what you see isn’t “real.” Then there is the whiners in politics, from both sides but more frustrating and hypocritical from those on the right.
The only people you don’t hear “whining” in this country are Latinos (unless they are Latinas joining their gender victim-obsessed “sisters”), either because they are rendered voiceless because they don’t “matter” save as an object of free-for-all hate, or they are too divided by “ethnicity” to be able to come together as a group, much as you can’t expect blacks and whites to join together for their “shared experiences” with racism—except, of course, when they can find “common ground” with shared paranoia against brown-skinned people, who in this society essentially exist between a rock and a hard place.
OK, so there has been some weak efforts by the "mainstream" at “assimilation” and "inclusion" to prevent any misplaced whining. Take for example a Latino as the lead in a “superhero” film, in this case Warner’s DC film Blue Beetle, which was an even worse bomb at the box office than Disney's MCU film The Marvels. But then again, it was just a “token” crumb that wasn’t expected to do well and the studio didn’t even really care.
Digital Spy noted that Blue Beetle never had a chance despite a Rotten Tomato score of 76 percent (double that of Aquaman 2) and a 92 percent audience score, because its lack of promotion and that while Blue Beetle might have his fans in DC Comics, you can't call the character a well-known property. "It's hard to quantify exactly how much the lack of promotion hurt at the box office, but it certainly didn't help in trying to establish a new superhero for the wider audience. There was virtually no promotion for it.”
However, “Where the movie is more successful is rooting itself in Latin culture, both in the references and the topical subject matter. It might not be subtle and the superhero elements get in the way of deeper exploration of its societal themes, but at least Blue Beetle's generic story is told with a specific, unique viewpoint.”
Unfortunately, while black “culture” (such as in the Black Panther films) is widely supported by those feeling “guilty” about being accused of racism, there is no such “guilt” about feeling “it’s not about us” in regard to Latino life or concerns in this country, since they are assumed to be “foreign.”
Instead, the Latino community has been blamed for not “supporting” the Blue Beetle enough (since it was "made" for "them"), but others have pointed out that this was a bit of a token gesture since it is a minor character in the DC universe that few people knew or cared existed; although unlike Disney’s MCU which hasn’t even bothered to create a superhero character for a Latino actor, Warner simply threw the Latino audience a crumb off the table that few were willing to scramble for.
But while The Marvels saw people complain about the “misogyny” behind its box office bombing, there has been a mostly blasé attitude from Hispanics generally, with mainly this kind of idiot thinking on a Reddit discussion page as to why the Latino community didn’t “support” the film:
I doubt that, as it's not "white Hispanics" who are running around saying "BROWN PRIDE" and it's usually darker-skinned latinos telling people like me that we're not "true" Mexicans or whatever. It's really sick thinking, this kind of racism. These "native pride" people need to fuck off or risk committing harm against another minority group again.
I replied to this in the usual way:
How about effing-off with that Euro-elite "pride" and admit your racism? Nobody invited or gave your ancestors permission to take the lands indigenous peoples occupied for tens of thousands of years before Europeans showed up when they had their own countries. The least you could do is show them some "gratefulness" and respect for their loss.
New studies indicate that indigenous peoples began “squatting” in the Americas as early as 33,000 years before the first Europeans, Africans and Asians showed up, and those peoples didn’t ask the natives' permission to do so, particularly when Europeans were already “squatting” in the lands they claimed as their own. Modern humans coming out of Africa only began “squatting” in what is now Europe about 50,000 years ago; the difference is the travel time and distance, and when the ice “land bridge” was in existence.
Yet we live in a society where a “brown-skinned” Latino with
indigenous blood who thinks “white,” Nick
Valencia, a third-generation Latino who considers himself full-blooded
American, felt the need to post (or was allowed to post) on CNN’s website a
comment on his experience in a time defined by ignorant bigots and xenophobes
in the poisonous atmosphere of hate fueled by far-right politicians, whose idea
of “fixing” the border problem is simply to keep those who “look” like him out, as they have been trying to do for a century:
Evidently, to some the brown color of my skin means I’m not even American. My friends and family tell me what I experienced that night is a microcosm of what is happening to Latinos across the country. You don’t have to look hard to find it. In news stories, in political discourse, on talk radio, in everyday conversation it seems it has become OK to treat Latinos in a negative and antagonistic way – whether they are new immigrants or longtime Americans. The anti-immigration legislation sweeping across the United States has made this plain. People in my Latino networks say they’ve noticed the change. And now I understand what they mean.
He might be accused of "whining" too, but then again he might as well be another voice in the wilderness, because who is listening? In this election, many people will only see “red” on the issue. Far-right Republicans in the House of Representatives are of course increasing their abusive rhetoric about migrants on the border in time for the upcoming election, which of course should be seen as both cynical and hypocritical. The House passed an immigration bill that Jean Lantz Reisz in The Conversation tells us that immigration law as it stands today already makes it virtually impossible for any migrant to apply for asylum:
Undocumented migrants entering the United States have few plausible options to legally stay in the country. For many migrants fleeing their countries due to violence, war, government collapse, natural disasters or any personal threats that could harm them, the only legal pathway of immigrating to the U.S. is by receiving asylum.
She goes on to say that
The proposed change that would deny asylum to those who have traveled through a third country is identical to a Department of Homeland Security rule that the agency adopted under former president Donald Trump’s administration in 2019…Republicans are proposing other laws to make it harder to receive asylum. One change would require asylum seekers to present a large amount of evidence proving their fear of persecution during their first interview with a government asylum officer – not later, when they go before a judge. The law would also end programs that allow migrants to stay with sponsors in the U.S. while seeking asylum.
In summary, the proposed changes would make it almost impossible for a migrant entering through the U.S.-Mexico border to get asylum, even if that migrant has a legitimate fear of returning to his or her home country.
The Republican law would also bar any migrant from asylum if they passed through a "safe" third-party country. But as The Guardian pointed out many times, no “third country” is safe from the “hell” the U.S. helped create:
Much of this current instability can be traced back to the June 2009 ouster of its then president, the erratic leftist Manuel Zelaya. Though the then US president Barack Obama declared the ouster “not legal”, his administration subsequently worked with regional powers such as Mexico to assure Zelaya did not return to office.
After Zelaya’s overthrow, Honduras was run by a series of rightwing leaders. When the most recent of them, Juan Orlando Hernández, looked likely to lose his re-election last year to the former journalist Salvador Nasralla, his government responded with a repression that Amnesty International characterized as having “violated international norms and the right to personal integrity, liberty and fair trial guarantees”.
During El Salvador’s civil war, which lasted
until 1992 and killed an estimated 75,000 Salvadorans, hundreds of thousands
fled to the United States, especially to southern California. There, young
Salvadoran boys found themselves endangered by local gangs and coalesced into
their own groups, including Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.
When some of these young gang members, not US citizens though culturally
American, were deported back to El Salvador, they took California’s gang
culture with them. The gangs have since proliferated throughout Central
America. Though MS-13 remains the bete noire of Trump and his acolytes, the
American origins of the gang go almost unreported.
All this being the case, it is rather irresponsible for the United States to take such an active role in creating the conditions that make people want to flee the countries that make up the Central American isthmus and then profess shock when they do so.
Author and political commentator Belén Fernández has also written that the so-called “third country” provision is a farce, also noting that there is no “safe” country in Central America, or is Mexico, as this political cartoon tells us:
Fernández adds that
The US’s own role in fueling violence in Central America’s Northern Triangle has been well known for decades – from its habit of backing right-wing dictators and death squads to its continuing support for homicidal state security forces. In the aftermath of the US-facilitated coup in Honduras in 2009, that nation became more unsafe than ever. And across the region, the US-exported model of neoliberal oppression has constituted a form of violence in its own right – perpetuating extreme inequality and condemning the masses to often existence-imperiling economic misery.
The level of violence has been exacerbated by the virtually unobstructed flow of guns from el Norte, with U.S. manufacturers reaping the “rewards” of death:
But one of the most crucial aspects to consider when contemplating US complicity in the appalling unsafety of the Northern Triangle is the sheer volume of US weapons circulating in the region…Foreign Policy reported that Trump was “sending guns south as migrants flee north”, with his administration “pushing to weaken oversight of gun exports”.
And yet the cross-border mobility of US armaments is nothing new. Back in 2014, Harry Penate – the former attache to Central America for the US Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives – spoke candidly about the significant role American guns were playing in the epidemic of violence in the region, which was already causing a northward exodus of refugees. According to Penate’s estimate at the time, half of the illegal weapons in murder-plagued El Salvador were from the US.
The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer cited reports that 49 percent of illegal and unregistered weapons recovered in El Salvador came from the US; in Honduras, it was 46 percent, and in Guatamela 29. While the causes of Central American violence were manifold, Blitzer noted, “American firepower facilitates it.”The US, in typical privatisation-obsessed fashion, has contracted with PMSCs in various countries “to provide assistance to the public security forces”, but the companies are perhaps better known for their services in protecting elite wealth, safeguarding the corporate exploitation of resources (including by repressing indigenous and environmental activists), and generally assisting in the proliferation of the neoliberal miracle.
This becomes even more consequential when we consider that current and former military and police often work in private security, as well. In El Salvador, “active members of the military are allowed to work with or own private security firms”. In Guatemala, meanwhile, “private security firms have been tied to extrajudicial killings”.
In November 2018, the Miami Herald wrote about the Honduran military police’s apparent use of US weapons to kill political protesters. The article quoted the US State Department on how “human rights concerns” were among the numerous factors taken into consideration when evaluating direct commercial sales of US weaponry to other countries. Also considered, the statement continued, was the “promotion of American industry”. But in the end, profit always trumps human rights – and while the US arms industry is presumably feeling pretty secure right about now, it is safe to say many people in “safe third countries” are not.
Instead, negative stereotyping and sensationalized stories are swallowed whole by the general public about Hispanics. I've already talked about how there is very little factual evidence in regard to human and sex trafficking, with definitions and numbers created out of thin air. The film Sound of Freedom made by QAnon adherents has "surprised" some people with its box office gross of close to $200 million, but critics have pointed out that most of it takes extreme liberties with the facts, and its real-life "hero," Tim Ballard, concocted a completely fictional account of his adventures that those who are actually on the ground say do not conform with the reality. In fact, Ballard and at least one of the producers of the film have been accused of using their position to "convince" women to consent to sexual acts as part of the "audition."
But "on the ground" the real issue is violent drug-trafficking gangs and cartels who are filling Americans insatiable need for illegal drugs are tearing apart those countries, but that is not of concern to most mainstream media outlets, where we see headlines like this (in a story written by The Seattle Times' Sara Jean Green, taking time out from her usual sexual violence crime stories to make a paranoid, scapegoating, racist border statement…
…while failing to note that "victims" have only themselves to blame if they use something that they know is dangerous, or the role of China as the principle source of fentanyl and its ingredients, and the fact that as ABC News pointed out that while Mexican cartels may be the "middleman" in the supply chain, they are not the “dealers” who are selling fentanyl on the street, but your regular U.S.-born and bred Joes:
Fentanyl isn’t just a street drug. It is also a legal painkiller than can be given safely under the right circumstances. When it comes to why some people overdose after taking fentanyl and some do not, it’s really “the fluctuation in purity that makes it unpredictable and deadly,” according to Nabarun Dasgupta, PhD, epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying opioids. According to law enforcement officers and former drug dealers interviewed by ABC News, drug dealers often think they can mitigate the risk for their clients by measuring the fentanyl carefully.
Done correctly, lacing illicit drugs with fentanyl often creates a return stream of customers because fentanyl is considered highly addictive. This is why fentanyl is often found in drugs like cocaine, counterfeit Xanax, counterfeit Adderall, or other drugs not classified as opioids “Fentanyl is good for business if you layer addiction into it,” Dasgupta said. A fraction of fentanyl could mimic the highs of other opioids, like heroin or prescription painkillers. Dealers will often use simple binding agents and a small amount of fentanyl when making counterfeit opioid pills or what they say is heroin, according to law enforcement.
Eric Falkowski, an incarcerated former fentanyl dealer interviewed by ABC News, claimed he could make over ten times the amount of counterfeit opioid pills with a kilo of fentanyl. “I felt like I could mitigate some of the dangerousness by using better manufacturing techniques […] and that worked for a long time.” He said, adding that the Tennessee overdose outbreak caused by his counterfeit pills “really came from some inadequate procedures and equipment."
Falkowski was ultimately convicted and sentenced to up to 25 years in prison in 2018 for intentionally adding fentanyl to counterfeit pills that resulted in someone's death and over a dozen near-fatal overdoses in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Overdose deaths usually lead to investigation by law enforcement, which is bad for business and can often result in the dealer's arrest. However, the drug is so profitable that it's worth the risk. Falkowski told ABC he was able to have "a pretty long run” selling drugs laced with fentanyl before his pills killed someone.
Illegal drugs are a $150 billion “industry” in the U.S., by far the largest “market” in the world, with Forbes reporting that much of the money passed around is being laundered through “virtual” money schemes like bitcoin to avoid detection. A PBS’ Frontline special noted that the economies of many countries have become dependent on this “trade,” and that
When the drug money ultimately makes its way into the foreign economy, it is used to pay the salaries of shippers and processors, as well as the bribes that supplement the incomes of government officials on both sides of the border. Whole regions of Mexico, Colombia and points in between have become dependent on the demand for drugs in the United States.
One of these countries is Ecuador, which saw its economy collapse during the pandemic, and in its place, according to Reuters, is “the growing reach of cocaine trafficking gangs, who have destabilized swathes of South America.” The New York Times notes that
Gang warfare only began plaguing Ecuador, a country of 18 million, in recent years. Over the past half-decade, foreign drug traffickers have joined forces with gangs like Los Choneros to build a powerful drug trafficking industry across the country, infiltrating the government, extorting businesses and killing Ecuadoreans who try to take them on.
Among the dead was a presidential candidate who vowed to remove corrupt government officials in league with the gangs. According to NBC News, “Ecuador was long an oasis of peace in the midst of the violence related to organized crime and drug cartels that ravaged Colombia for so many years.” But that has changed, since “Ecuador does not have the experience of drug trafficking organizations challenging the government as Colombia has had, it does not have the military, security services and resources to deal with the chaos and security threats it is now facing.”
This of course has been happening in Central America for even longer, but with members of U.S.-bred gangs like MS13 deported to those countries who do not have the resources to fight them, save with the “help” of the U.S. arming and funding government security forces who act like gangs themselves.
Recent gang violence in prisons and even in local television stations…
...has led to Ecuador’s current president to announce a state of siege as has also been done in El Salvador, where the civil and human rights of the innocent are as cynically regarded as is the “official” government statistics on the number of people killed by security forces. Still, those who see themselves as most threatened—the social and business elite—support such actions as long as they are not the ones targeted.
A ban on the personal possession of guns was lifted in Ecuador for civilian “protection,” but some suspect that this will only increase violence as more guns will be “lawfully” available to or sold on the black market to those who are still “unlawful” to own weapons.
Not surprisingly, as reported by Ecuador Times, the “pattern” of other countries in Latin America is being repeated over and over again: “In recent years, the United States has become the main country of origin where weapons that enter Ecuador illegally are manufactured, through different routes, especially from the border with Peru.”
Outside of subsidized U.S. agricultural products from “free trade” agreements, which helped destroy the livelihoods of millions of Mexican farmers who subsequently tried to take their expertise north to work on U.S. farms (legally or not), it has been gangs, money from the sale of illegal drugs and guns that are the apparently the principle “export” the U.S. sends south of the border.
The next question is why is it a “shock” that so many human beings have chosen to migrate north thinking that the U.S. is a “safe” haven for them since the U.S. has "exported" all the violent costs of drug-trafficking to the countries they are escaping from? I don’t see fentanyl users as the "real" victims, but as people who knowingly put not just their own lives in danger, but others from far away places they don’t even think about.
Did so-called
“Christian” Mike Johnson and his far-right compatriots talk to any of "those"
people on their recent visit to the border and hear their whines? Of course not; for the far-right they are just "vermin." The total hypocrisy in forcing individuals to “prove”
they have legitimate fears of violence is undercut by the knowledge that such
violence and fear has been reported by every source that bothers to find out,
yet far-right Republicans cannot even see the forest, let alone the trees.
And it is only going to get worse. On a YouTube video showing the mayor of Chicago being “human” compared to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, one comment complained about the mayor’s stance showing concern for migrants; I replied to this by stating it is all very simple on what to do if you don’t like to see any more of those "illegals" in your city: stop buying, selling and using illegal drugs that are causing the violence that is causing migrants to flee their countries. Of course nobody “liked” that comment.
The U.S. isn’t the only country with anti-immigrant and anti-asylum attitudes, but it certainly seems more blatant in English-speaking countries. A “stop the boats” law was recently passed in the UK, “ironic” since both the current prime minister and the Home Secretary are nonwhites—thus giving the law “legitimacy” despite the law not being in compliance with international law (as is not U.S. law). According to CNN in the months before the law passed,
The UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) has already said that the bill, if passed, would be a “clear breach” of the Refugee Convention and has urged lawmakers to “reconsider the Bill and instead pursue more humane and practical policy solutions.” Which raises the question: why is the government pressing ahead with this bill?
All major political parties agree that the small boat crisis needs to be stopped. The new bill, which essentially hands the government the right to deport anyone landing illegally in the UK, is supposed to be a deterrent for people who seek to travel illegally to the UK. That, in theory, should break the people traffickers’ business model. Problem solved? Not quite.
Experts say that this would only work if the people trying to get into Britain this way can easily access safe, legal routes into the country. In many cases these don’t exist and even if they did, could lead to them being deported from the UK anyway.
Does sound “familiar,” doesn’t it? Anyone with a British accent can sell you a bag of foul-smelling doo-doo. U.S. immigration law has been governed by racism against Hispanic immigrants since 1965, and each successive “reform” law has made the situation worse. Instead of thinking and having another one of those government "studies" that were so popular in the 1960s, all we have is more whining about "them," just like the Nazis did in regard to Jews.
Hell, if anyone is to blame for the state and future of this country, it is the lazy, whining Gen-Z generation, who besides making crap music--some guy on Quora named Jim says this about what people are listening to today:
It seems no one can do anything themselves anymore. Pop music today is comprised of a monochordal riff consisting of a basic scale played on some sort of digital synthesizer, set to a 4/4 time at 120 bpm (thanks to Steve Chall for the correction.) with the bass and vocals so hot you can't hear that there's no other music behind it. There might be a string swell in there somewhere if you're lucky. And if it's not hip-hop, and it actually has a chord structure, then 9 times out of 10 it'll be a I-V-vi-IV structure over and over again; whether it's Taylor Swift, One Republic or Maroon 5. So sad and uncreative. But then again, it IS pop music; which caters to what the masses want to hear. I blame the masses for putting up with it. If these crappy songs didn't make millions, they wouldn't exist. The music industry has been allowed to get lazier due to the public not caring about what goes into their ears.
And of course liking movies with little of what was once understood to have "artistic merit," and spending little time "enlightening" themselves...
...and polls show they have this amazing inability to distinguish between moral and immoral, and ethical and unethical, when it comes to voting for (or not) for someone like Trump. Migrants on the border who just come here to work and not involve themselves in the politics (as the far-right fears) will not be responsible for turning the country into something that looks like this:
By the way, this used to be a hotel/apartment in the First Hill district in Seattle that was in use until 2022 when it was deemed a fire hazard, and then this New Year's weekend apparently some squatters set a fire inside of it for "heat."
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