anyway tear gas is actually a fucking nerve agent that can absolutely kill you and even though governments think its cool to spray it on kids the geneva convention disagrees
i’ve been thinking about this all day. speaking as a person who has been tear gassed to hell and back i wouldn’t fucking wish that sensation on my worst enemy let alone CHILDREN. it’s beyond words. don’t believe people when they tell you it’s for crowd control. it’s not. it’s to make crowds PANIC. it’s to make you fear for your life. it’s to make you feel like you’re dying. it can trigger panic attacks and asthma attacks in young people and heart attacks in the elderly. it’s fucking unconscionable is what it is and every single government who uses it should be shamed for eternity
The other option is bullets you know…? Would you rather tear gas or live ammunition like in other countries?
the other option is GRANTING THEM ASYLUM you ABSOLUTE DEMONS
The absolute bare minimum would be for us to stop trying to subvert U.S. laws that exist to protect refugees, actually accept asylum requests in a reasonably timely manner, and let them stay and find work/shelter in the U.S. while their requests for asylum are processed.
The legally mandated process for requesting asylum is to go to a port of entry, make a preliminary request, and then await a decision on one’s case IN THE UNITED STATES. These people showed up to do exactly what they were supposed to do, but Trump/the Border Protection Agency have been limiting access to the port of entry (taking only 40 to 100 requests per day), so many of these people are looking at months long wait-times camped out on the Mexican side of the border (in a literal, overcrowded camp, I mean) just to put in a request. And they may be racing against the clock, because Trump has been trying for a deal with Mexico to make asylum seekers wait on the Mexican side of the border for months or even years as their individual requests for asylum are processed.*
*for the sake of completeness of information: as of 11/27/18 the deal seems to have fallen through.
The Associated Press correspondent at the border just reported that we’ve started tear-gassing toddlers:
The context is that asylum-seekers have been trapped in overstretched shelters in Mexico by a series of policy changes by the Trump administration and agreements between the Trump administration and the Mexican government, and today a group of refugees marched to the U.S. border to request dialogue + petition to be allowed to make the asylum claim that under standard interpretations of international law they are entirely entitled to make. The U.S. closed the border crossing. One woman with a tear-gassed three-year-old told reporters that the U.S. launched tear gas at the crowd when some refugees started trying to squeeze through the fence. No one crossed into the U.S. Thanks to the strong winds, migrants who weren’t near the fence were still choked by it.
It would be legal and manageable under U.S. law to admit every one of these families, give their case for asylum a hearing in a court of law, and allow private charities and churches to provide for their safety and settlement in the U.S. pending those cases. The administration decided to make this their hill to die on instead, and has pushed for the use of lethal force.
There’s a really dangerous and scary phenomenon where someone becomes convinced that any shred of humanity or decency they show will be a foot in the door, and that their only option is to keep buckling down, and to take all failures to get what they want as evidence they weren’t forceful enough. It’s the spiral of escalation that leads to choking toddlers with gas grenades and feeling like you’re in the right because if you granted these people a hearing some of them would stay in the country and that’d encourage more of them and there’s no way at all to reach any kind of equilibrium except vicious violence at the outset, made more vicious every time the current level of force fails to get everything you want from every single person out there. I’m scared that the forces at the border will keep escalating.
I don’t really know a good way to have institutional checks that go “our objective here is not that we win and they lose, no matter what; our objectives also include not being drawn into tear-gassing toddlers.”
An anguished question from a Trump supporter: “Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?”
The serious answer: Here’s what we really think about Trump supporters – the rich, the poor, the malignant and the innocently well-meaning, the ones who think and the ones who don’t…
That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.”
That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, “Okay.”
That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, “No problem.”
That when he made up stories about seeing muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, “Not an issue.”
That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn’t care, you chirped, “He sure knows me.”
That when you heard him illustrate his own character by telling that cute story about the elderly guest bleeding on the floor at his country club, the story about how he turned his back and how it was all an imposition on him, you said, “That’s cool!”
That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.
That when you heard him brag that he doesn’t read books, you said, “Well, who has time?”
That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, “That makes sense.”
That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, “Yes!”
That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man’s coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, “What a great guy!”
That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, “Thumbs up!”
That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, “That’s the way I want my President to be.”
That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they’re supposed to be regulating and you have said, “What a genius!”
That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, “That’s smart!”
That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was the middle of water and you have said, “That makes sense.”
That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, “falling in love” with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, “That’s statesmanship!”
That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids. has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas – he explains that they’re just “animals” – and you say, “well, ok then.”
That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.
What you don’t get, Trump supporters in 2018, is that succumbing to frustration and thinking of you as stupid may be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also…hear me…charitable.
Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are *less* flattering.
bring this back and suddenly capitalists don’t wanna go to war no more
Bring this back bc tbh its just common sense. If you truly think war is the best and only way to solve a dispute, then you must be willing to die for that cause.
Cheloneuniverse 