"How often have you heard that defense? What if the "context” is just more manipulation? This video is a crash course in decoding manipulative communication. I break down a specific example to show you the layered tactics — from dog whistles and moral laundering to straw men and specificity illusions — used to sway public opinion. If you want to understand how propaganda works in the modern age, watch this.“
remember, the more both sides (conservative AND liberal) finger-point and call each other fascists, the more divided we are, which is exactly what the administration wants. they want us to destroy each other; don’t give them what they want. it’s imperative that we stand firm TOGETHER rather than succumb to their underhanded tactics. community saves lives.
Genocide experts warn that India is about to genocide the Shompen people
Who are the Shompen?
The Shompen are an indigenous culture that lives in the Great Nicobar Island, which is nowadays owned by India. The Shompen and their ancestors are believed to have been living in this island for around 10,000 years. Like other tribes in the nearby islands, the Shompen are isolated from the rest of the world, as they chose to be left alone, with the exception of a few members who occasionally take part in exchanges with foreigners and go on quarantine before returning to their tribe. There are between 100 and 400 Shompen people, who are hunter-gatherers and nomadic agricultors and rely on their island’s rainforest for survival.
ALT
Why is there risk of genocide?
India has announced a huge construction mega-project that will completely change the Great Nicobar Island to turn it into “the Hong Kong of India”.
Nowadays, the island has 8,500 inhabitants, and over 95% of its surface is made up of national parks, protected forests and tribal reserve areas. Much of the island is covered by the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, described by UNESCO as covering “unique and threatened tropical evergreen forest ecosystems. It is home to very rich ecosystems, including 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms, and bryophytes, among others. In terms of fauna, there are over 1800 species, some of which are endemic to this area. It has one of the best-preserved tropical rain forests in the world.”
The Indian project aims to destroy this natural environment to create an international shipping terminal with the capacity to handle 14.2 million TEUs (unit of cargo capacity), an international airport that will handle a peak hour traffic of 4,000 passengers and that will be used as a joint civilian-military airport under the control of the Indian Navy, a gas and solar power plant, a military base, an industrial park, and townships aimed at bringing in tourism, including commercial, industrial and residential zones as well as other tourism-related activities.
This project means the destruction of the island’s pristine rainforests, as it involves cutting down over 852,000 trees and endangers the local fauna such as leatherback turtles, saltwater crocodiles, Nicobar crab-eating macaque and migratory birds. The erosion resulting from deforestation will be huge in this highly-seismic area. Experts also warn about the effects that this project will have on local flora and fauna as a result of pollution from the terminal project, coastal surface runoff, ballasts from ships, physical collisions with ships, coastal construction, oil spills, etc.
The indigenous people are not only affected because their environment and food source will be destroyed. On top of this, the demographic change will be a catastrophe for them. After the creation of this project, the Great Nicobar Island -which now has 8,500 inhabitants- will receive a population of 650,000 settlers. Remember that the Shompen and Nicobarese people who live on this island are isolated, which means they do not have an immune system that can resist outsider illnesses. Academics believe they could die of disease if they come in contact with outsiders (think of the arrival of Europeans to the Americas after Christopher Columbus and the way that common European illnesses were lethal for indigenous Americans with no immunization against them).
And on top of all of this, the project might destroy the environment and the indigenous people just to turn out to be useless and sooner or later be abandoned. The naturalist Uday Mondal explains that “after all the destruction, the financial viability of the project remains questionable as all the construction material will have to be shipped to this remote island and it will have to compete with already well-established ports.” However, this project is important to India because they want to use the island as a military and commercial post to stop China’s expansion in the region, since the Nicobar islands are located on one of the world’s busiest sea routes.
Last year, 70 former government officials and ambassadors wrote to the Indian president saying the project would “virtually destroy the unique ecology of this island and the habitat of vulnerable tribal groups”. India’s response has been to say that the indigenous tribes will be relocated “if needed”, but that doesn’t solve the problem. As a spokesperson for human rights group Survival International said: “The Shompen are nomadic and have clearly defined territories. Four of their semi-permanent settlements are set to be directly devastated by the project, along with their southern hunting and foraging territories. The Shompen will undoubtedly try to move away from the area destroyed, but there will be little space for them to go. To avoid a genocide, this deadly mega-project must be scrapped.”
On 7 February 2024, 39 scholars from 13 countries published an open letter to the Indian president warning that “If the project goes ahead, even in a limited form, we believe it will be a death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide.”
How to help
The NGO Survival International has launched this campaign:
From this site, you just need to add your name and email and you will send an email to India’s Tribal Affairs Minister and to the companies currently vying to build the first stage of the project.
Share it with your friends and acquittances and on social media.
The top pictures are of a rosy maple moth, the bottom pictures are of maple seed pods. Rosy maple moths have evolved to mimic the seeds of the maple trees where they lay their eggs and that their young feed upon!
My siblings in Christ. Do not use the phrase “I’ll be praying for you” to upset or offend or trigger someone. Do not weaponize prayer to hurt people. Do not weaponize prayer to tell someone you’re better than them.
Praying for your enemies is the definition of a “but when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret” situation.
Do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners [and on social media] so that others may see them. If you’re telling someone you’re praying for them, it should be spoken only as a message of love and comfort and support.
So if it won’t make them feel loved and comforted and supported, go👏🏻to 👏🏻your 👏🏻inner 👏🏻room 👏🏻
if you’re going to talk about the mass starvation of Palestinians (which thank you) and the long term epigenetic affects please don’t forget about Sudan. the Sudani people are going through one of the worst starvations in history. more than 24 Million are facing acute hunger, with an estimated 500,000 children alone already dead from starvation. please be vocal about the horrors happening in Sudan right now. they will feel it for generations to come as well and it is just as heartbreaking and anger at the world inducing and important to speak on it especially in the context of the dangers of forced famine
no matter how hard i try, nothing i write will ever be as fucked up as the stuff somebody who thinks they’re creating a Wholesome AU with unexamined beliefs will make.
sometimes I think about how rattlesnakes are starting to adapt to bite immediately instead of using their rattle as a warning, because this defense mechanism that says “im here! im frightened! don’t come close or ill bite you” has instead ilicited a reaction of “oh fuck a rattlesnake, i should kill it”
so of course every snake that has the instinct to warn humans of its presence gets killed, and only the snakes that bite first and dont make themselves known get to survive. a human who’s been bitten is too worried about his swelling ankle to decapitate a snake with a shovel.
it’s a good example of how humans make the world more dangerous for ourselves by believing that we have mastery and ownership of it. we think we have the power and importance to control the life around us down to the snakes and insects, but every animal fights for life. and no animal thinks that any human is more important than it’s own life.
This actually reminds me of the time I was backpacking with my dad, brother, and now ex. We heard a rattlesnake off the path, and everyone stopped walking.
My brother was like, “we have to go kill it.”
And I was like, “nah, dude. We’ll just keep going. That’s an invitation to leave it alone. If we don’t bug it, it won’t bug us.”
And my ex was like, “we can’t just walk past it! It will bite us!”
And I was like, “no, we can’t walk toward it. We’re not going to do that.”
After some flurried arguing and my ex telling me I was going to get myself poisoned, I kept going down the trail without even looking toward the snake. It didn’t jump out and bite me, my group ended up following me, and everything was fine.
Years later, I was hiking with my kid and some friends and we spotted another rattlesnake coiled up right next to the trail. This one didn’t rattle, but we couldn’t stay there waiting for it to move, so, once again, I picked up my kid (who it turns out I was newly pregnant with the last time I had to walk past a rattlesnake) and headed sedately down the path, giving the snake plenty of space and not looking at it, and my friend and her kid followed, and no one was bitten and no one was decapitated.
We assign all these evil intentions to animals that simply are not there. If we show them they are safe from us, more often than not we will be safe from them.
