I’m plotting a hostile takeover of DC Comics with @kuttithevangu and we’re going to start writing Batman ourselves. Here are some of our plans:
–The Joker Goes to Clown College. The Joker has become tediously overused, unfunny, and ludicrously dark and gritty. He’s so fucking boring that we’re putting a ban on stories in which he’s a major villain for several years. In the meantime, Dick Grayson starts visiting him in Arkham with very special visitors in tow: professional clowns from Haly’s Circus. They offer constructive criticism and then help him get accepted to a four-year clown college, where he can get a degree in clowning, improve his comedy potential, and learn to execute jokes with fewer executions. Clown college in this world is just like regular university so The Joker has to like… write essays on Buster Keaton and stuff. [Alternative: The Joker accidentally turns himself into a hamster (with a Joker face) and has to live in a cage in the Batcave while they research ways to turn him back.]
–New Original Character: Brad. Damian Wayne isn’t Bruce’s only illegitimate biological son! Brad is a perfectly normal, well-adjusted teenager whose mother had a one-night stand with Bruce at a party years ago. Brad decides to reach out to his biological playboy father after tabloids confirm a paternity test. Damian finds this very threatening but there’s nothing he can do about it because Brad is an oblivious civilian who only visits every few weeks and has no idea that his father and half-siblings are vigilantes.
–Tim Drake Gets What He Deserves. Tim has been written darker and grittier with every passing year, a far cry from the fun dweeb he was when first introduced. As he becomes more and more like Bruce, he picks up another of his mentor’s traits: the ability to attract plucky youngsters who insist on cheering him up. Previous unsuccessful attempts to introduce Carrie Kelley to the main DC canon are scrapped; she’s BACK and she’s a 14 year old tacky gay genderfluid snoop who figures out his identity and passionately believes that Red Robin needs a Burger King, or something. She gets what she wants and she wants to play DnD. HOW THE TURNS HAVE TABLED, TIMOTHY.
–Batfamily camping trip. IDK, maybe Brad is responsible for this. It goes poorly because no one (except perhaps Babs) has any experience in legitimate outdoor recreation beyond hardcore wilderness survival.
–#batmanchallenge. The Batman Challenge starts trending and young people start coming to Gotham in an attempt to get Batman to punch them on video. Jason Todd gets in on it.
–The Secret Life of Alfred Pennyworth. Alfred has a whole secret social life that Bruce doesn’t know about because he has never once contemplated that Alfred is a sexual being with considerable game. He’s very popular among the ladies at the bridge club and Old People Who Love Shakespeare Club, which is for old people.
Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.
…what’s going on in Australia?
Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:
The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!
Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”
BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!
Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.
OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”
The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!
Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?
Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.
We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.
(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).
So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
Let that sink in.
And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.
The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.
Also, that Australia/New Zealand immigration deal? Australia has slowly been taking away the rights of New Zealanders resident in Australia – including children born in Australia to Kiwi parents – and making it nigh-impossible for them to actually get Australian citizenship, basically all because of paranoia that brown people will move from NZ to Australia. They’re aggressively deporting Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders, even those who may have come as small children and have no memory of New Zealand, both for things like being convicted of any crime and for things like “being of bad character”. Or, rather, they don’t deport them. They put them in offshore prison camps and tell them they can’t leave until they agree to leave Australia. (It’s not that these things don’t affect Pākehā NZers, it’s that we’re not the real targets.)
During our election campaign last year, the Deputy PM of Australia openly said that if Labour were elected to government it would be bad for Australia because they would encourage refugees to try and get to Australia hoping to be taken by New Zealand. They have an island fortress mentality Trump hasn’t even started to achieve.
And the thing about Australia – there isn’t the coverage that America has. Not even in our own country. It’s hard to find out what’s happening – visas for journalists to visit Nauru are prohibitively expensive – and … no one really cares. It’s so entrenched that it’s the status quo, and when I called my MP and senators to go, WTF guys? the response was like, “…oh yeah, thanks for your feelings, cool, bye”.
I honestly tune out a lot of the coverage because, at this point, I don’t know what to do. Both major parties support these policies, so I vote for the Greens. I contacted my representatives. I walked in protest marches. I donate to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and other charities.
So I guess, if I have advice for Americans, it’s to not let this become the status quo. Because you’ll wake up one day and it will have always been like this.
Holy shit, I knew it was bad here but I didn’t know it was that bad. Why don’t we hear about the depth of these things in Australia, how can they keep us so in the dark?
What you can do to help the Human Rights crisis in Australia:
If you are Australian:
Keep up to date and informed. The only major media outlets that routinely reports on this issue is The Guardian Australia. They are free online but consider donating if you can to keep it free access.
The Saturday Paper is another independent online news source that reports on this.
Follow or sign up to GetUp!. GetUp! is Australia’s largest progressive grassroots activist group and has lots of campaigns and information about this issue and many others, such as climate change, economic justice, and democratic and civil rights. Donate if you can, sign their peritions, follow their campaigns.
CONTACT YOUR MPs AND SENATORS. This is really important, especially if they are supporters of the policy. Keep public pressure on then, make them feel it. Letter templates are good, but personally written letters/emails are better. Call them if you can. And respond to them with your displeasure if they send you a cookie cutter response of their party’s policy on “stopping the boats”.
SHOW UP TO PROTESTS. Another really important one. Even if you just show up and march, your physical presence counts. They’re not as scary as it might seem.
DONATE. I really cannot stress this enough, if you can afford it, donate.
WHO SHOULD I DONATE TO?
Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) provides financial and legal support, as well as counseling and community services, to refugees already in Australia.
Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) are a group of state-based advocacy groups that support refugees in Australia and advocate for those trapped in Australia’s offshore detention regime (link is for the Sydney group but contains links to other states).
GetUp! is one of the best to donate to for political action. They have options to donate to the organisation as a whole, or to specific campaigns.
If you are a member of the Australian Labor Party, please do what you can to bring up this issue and pressure the party leadership to change its policy.
If you are NOT Australian
Do what you can to contact your government and representatives to bring up this issue and pressure Australia to change their policy.
SPREAD THIS POST AND OTHERS LIKE IT. Australians do not have the numbers and influence on his site that Americans and British have. Please spread this information and resources so that other Australians might see it and feel like they have some power to change it or even know about it.
If you are a New Zealander: please continue to keep the pressure on your government to call out Australia and offer to take refugees.
we need to stop idolizing tom holland immediately. yesterday, actually.
it’s really cool that he’s this seemingly progressive sweet young dude but i saw a whole post about how he’s “the perfect example of non-toxic masculinity uwu” and another post gave him credit for trans-coding peter parker like “coding” stuff in homecoming wasn’t basic “ha ha misgendering is funny” stuff or misogyny and also stuff that’s in the script which he did not write and should not get credit for.
like………. he’s great. watch his interviews, enjoy his performances.
but also he’s like 21??? im 21 and im incredibly stupid all the time. tom’s also gonna be incredibly stupid because like……. people in their early 20s….. are stupid…. and say stupid shit…. and if you hold them to an impossibly high standard…. they will fail you…. no matter how good their intentions are….
just. cut it out early before this turns into another idolization-to-hatred cycle.
Yahoo News Doxxes Businesses Contracted For Child Internment Camps
…
The data reviewed by Yahoo News was for a contract vehicle called “Shelter Care for Unaccompanied Children 2022.”
This included 10 different contracts for up to approximately $92
million that were awarded to five different vendors starting in
September 2017.
…
Comprehensive Health Services Inc. (CHSI), a Florida-based company that
touts its experience with “immigrant shelter services” received the bulk
of the contracts. According to GovTribe, the company was awarded three
contracts worth up to about $65 million.
…
Dynamic Service Solutions, a Maryland firm, was awarded a contract worth up to $8.7 million from HHS
…
Southwest Key Programs was awarded two contracts through the vehicle in
September 2017 worth up to $1.8 million each for “emergency shelter
operations.”
…
Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that the government is set to pay Southwest Key over $458 million
this fiscal year. Southwest Key’s website went offline on Tuesday
evening shortly after the stories from Bloomberg and Yahoo News were
published.
…
Dynamic Educational Systems, a subsidiary of the Arizona firm Exodyne,
was awarded a pair of HHS contracts worth up to approximately $5.6
million for “emergency shelter operations.”
…
The fifth business with contracts through the HHS vehicle for “shelter
care for unaccompanied children” is Virginia-based MVM. According to
GovTribe, the company was awarded two contracts worth up to $9.5 million
in September 2017 for “shelter operations” and for unspecified
“emergency and other relief services.” Earlier this month, the Daily Beast reported
MVM was looking to fill a number of positions, including a compliance
coordinator to work in San Antonio on the “rapid deployment of an
Emergency Influx Shelter for unaccompanied children.”