As the world celebrates the coming of 2025, Palestinians in Gaza are stepping into another year of genocide. This genocide has taken most of Hamdi’s (@hamdigaza) family, including his mother, his aunt, his siblings, his cousins, his nephews, and his nieces.
With the skyrocketing prices of basic necessities like food, but also clothes and blankets, Hamdi needs these donations to survive. He has already lost so much to this genocide please, please give his fundraiser more support! He has barely raised €5k even though he has been fundraising since May! Also his fundraiser is so stagnant he has only received 5 donations in the past 2 months!
imagine being a Korean person awake at like one in the morning trying to accept that the president of South Korea actually just tried to go full dictatorship by way of an emergency martial law because he was basically having a political temper tantrum and every agency and corporation in the country is all hands on deck, code red mode on everything and the military is being deployed and then the assembly revokes the martial law and then the president is like lol nevermind and now you have to get ready to work at your shitty job on a Wednesday
can americans in the notes please stop comparing this to trump. we’re not america. yoon seok-yeol isn’t donald trump. this is a national emergency in south korea that has nothing to do with american politics. stop making everything about you for once.
anyway just so you know many Korean citizens were not sitting still at home they threw on their winter coats (our winters are very cold) and got to the parliament building however they could (there was a traffic jam, so people got out of the taxis to ride bikes) to go physically stand in front of guns
(some background: it wasn’t 30 years ago that the military of a dictatorship massacred protesting civilians by railgunning them from tanks and helicopters. not only is the democratic revolution still in living memory, but there was also a popular movie this year about the military coup. Han Kang became a nobel laureate this October for writing about the people who died in those protests.)
the special ops team’s guns on the night of were loaded with rubbers, but there were reports that real bullets had been handed out ready to be used if the order came down (south korea bans the use of guns. it is also treason if you fire at parliament.)
what helped was the speed with which people rushed to take action against this middle-of-the-night onslaught. soldiers had been sent to politicians’ homes to arrest them before they could gather in assembly, but the politicians had already headed to parliament for an emergency meeting.
a lot more Koreans were tracking the situation via social media, news reports, radio channels, and personal streamings. night shift workers at parliament barricaded the doors. the scrutiny and pressure put on the military troops attacking parliament was not insignificant. it bought us the ten minutes required for parliament to slapdash a martial law cancellation motion and vote on it, even as the strike team was breaking the windows and pushing in to the assembly hall.
this could all have gone really fucking wrong. we were saved by every civilian who put themselves in front of gunmen (including disabled human rights protestors), every councilor who jumped a wall to go vote, every reporter who shared breaking news on-site, every single audience member of live streams and social media, every police or soldier who tried not to escalate violence against civilians.
this was very much a group effort. and we were very lucky it didn’t go sideways, but at the same time, it had nothing to do with luck.
I know most of tumblr is thinking about the USA right now. but fuck the nz government right now too. tomorrow, the treaty principles bill, the ‘worst, most comprehensive breach of Te Tiriti in modern times’ is being introduced to parliament early, because there were activations planned country wide and the cowards decided to pull it forwards. fuck this government. a friend of mine had to go home early, crying. I’ve been in shock all day since it came out.
check on your Māori friends, e hoa mā. see what they need. see how you can help. everyday, we see and experience racism. from people around us, up to our government. community care will save us.
The Spinoff has a pretty good debunking of the supposed “rationale” behind the bill in this opinion piece by Carwyn Jones, the academic quoted in that Guardian article above:
For people overseas, you know how it’s a popular simplification that here in Aotearoa New Zealand we did way better than every other colonial nation when it came to our relations with the indigenous population?
Well, for the sake of communication, let’s ignore that that’s actually bollocks. We’ve got our cool Treaty that made us better. The Treaty Principles Bill seeks to redefine how our Government follows that Treaty. How, you might ask? Why, by COMPLETELY IGNORING LITERALLY EVERYTHING IT SAYS of course!
The bill is being pushed by the ACT party, who are treating the Treaty of Waitangi like the USA’s founding document, as if every founding document ever written exists to codify a set of rights for all citizens equally. That is not what Te Tiriti is! Te Tiriti is a document codifying the relationship between Crown and Māori, in such a way that at least the Te Reo version explicitly ensures that Māori are not erased.
It is not a founding document meant to lay down human rights. Know what does that here? The Human Rights Act. The Treaty is what says “hey you pākehā, you can settle here, just don’t fucking trample māori in the process.”
And yes, it’s more complicated. The Crown have never followed Te Tiriti. Not properly. And the English language version was explicitly written not to be a correct translation and by the English text the Crown has more rights than the chiefs agreed to. But putting that aside for a second, we have a treaty, and in recent decades there has been a push to do so, in part by the establishment of the Treaty Principles by the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 which laid out specifically how the Government is meant to follow the Treaty and uphold Māori rangatiratanga, which is most widely agreed to mean sovereignty. The following are the 1975 Principles:
The acquisition of sovereignty in exchange for the protection of rangatiratanga.
The treaty established a partnership and imposed on the partners the duty to act reasonably and in good faith.
The freedom of the Crown to govern.
The Crown’s duty of active protection.
The duty of the Crown to remedy past breaches.
Māori to retain rangatiratanga over their resources and taonga and have all citizenship privileges.
Duty to consult.
Basically, Māori did not cede sovereignty, they keep their land and treasures, and the Crown is supposed to be in partnership and consult Māori. Māori are guaranteed a voice in government and in decisions. That’s why we have Māori electorates in our elections! Māori, as per current law, are guaranteed representation in Parliament. Whether or not it’s enough is another topic, but they’re at least guaranteed something.
ACT, through the Treaty Principles Bill seeks to go in the complete opposite direction. They have three principles they want to replace the 1975 ones with:
The New Zealand Government has the right to govern all New Zealanders
The New Zealand Government will honour all New Zealanders in the chieftainship of their land and all their property.
All New Zealanders are equal under the law with the same rights and duties.
Principle 1 is pretty insidious - because the New Zealand Government means, in this context, the representation of the Crown. Whom there has been much controversy over lately, with the Prime Minister and head of ACT’s coalition partner National saying - against the academic consensus - that the Crown has absolute sovereignty. The point of Principle 1 is to erase the idea that Māori have any sovereignty over themselves, or that they are in any way their own group outside of a Crown hegemony.
Principle 2 is again pretty insidious. It puts all property rights on equal standing. I might point out that Māori lost 74% of the entire North Island between 1860 and 2000 (having had 80% of it in 1860, and at most 4% of it in 2000), and what of it was gifted to the Crown for specific purposes was not returned after those purposes were done. When does this Bill decide “their land” begins in time? Now, when almost all Māori land has been stolen? After all, this Government have recently removed the rule that said Māori could still claim seashore rights despite not having had exclusive use of it which the criteria normally requires, if their land had been stolen. Y'know, that thing that typically prevents one from having exclusive use of one’s land! And they’re using their recent Fast Track Proposals Bill to cut Māori out of decisions that affect what land they are recognised as having. Under these rules, an Iwi has to defer to the Crown wanting to build a pipeline through fucking wāhi tapu (sacred land) (WHICH BY THE WAY IS NOT SOMETHING I MADE UP, THAT’S A RECENT NEWS STORY) because they would have no codified right to disagree, especially not under the Fast Track Bill which literally allows the Crown to decide arbitrarily that the Iwi is being too precious and ignore their objections entirely.
The story I linked? To illustrate this, the above two principles seek to unequivocally side with the Council, the Crown, on the pipeline, and remove all avenues for Tūhourangi, Ngāti Tūmatawera, to fight back and protect their land from a Crown body that does not in any way respect them or the graves of their tūpuna. Because well, they can say nope, the government has a right to do this, and the land belongs to the Council, never mind it was stolen.
Principle 3 is just a dogwhistle. That’s not the point of the Treaty, not remotely, and it’s already covered by the Human Rights Act. In fact, it goes directly against the Treaty, because, as is painfully fucking obvious, the whole POINT was that Māori were not culturally annihilated by the hegemony of a much larger power! The whole point was to make explicit that Māori, as per this agreement, have certain fucking rights to make sure they’re not overwhelmed!
And it’s obvious that this interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi removes literally the entire point of the Treaty. The Treaty Principles Bill is one side of a codified relationship seeking to unilaterally eviscerate the protections supposedly built into that relationship for the other side. The Crown signed a contract, saying they had to respect Māori. And now that progress is meaning it might be slightly followed, the Crown’s representatives in the coalition Government are seeking to make sure the Crown no longer has to follow any part of that contract.
If New Zealand is supposedly better than other colonial nations, this government is trying to do everything possible to change that and get rid of the one thing that demands the Crown and Iwi be equal. The one thing that means we did better? Yeah, that is the thing they’re trying to get rid of.
The Princess Bride is such a funny book to read after ONLY seeing the movie. Like Goldman made up a fake author from a fake country and proceeded to write the book as an abridged version of what the fake author wrote… and then he proceeds to add in notes to the “abridged version” mentioning all the boring world building stuff he skipped because it was boring.
Like shout out to William Goldman, man really did make an entire book that is just “the cool scenes you thought of in your head” and then made up a fake author to abridge so he doesn’t have to connect them.
And it slaps
I used to work at a used bookstore, and had a group of three teenage boys come in wanting the “Unabridged Version” of Princess Bride.
They would not believe that it was a narrative device and the unabridged version didn’t exist. Said no author would credit someone else for their own writing, that was ridiculous, and was there a guy who knew about fantasy they could talk to?
I grabbed a coworker and left him to deal with it. Heard him explaining the concept of a pen name as I walked away.
the unabridged princess bride 🤝goncharov
fictitious works of media that sound very interesting but can never exist in a way that lives up to the expectations built by their nonexistence
