If you’ve ever wondered why people in Hawai'i hate tourists, try to wrap your mind around the fact that there are CURRENTLY, RIGHT NOW, tourists sipping martinis and looking at fish within swimming range of the fresh corpses of local people who couldn’t escape the overnight destruction of their entire town.
Try to comprehend that there are fully functional, high capacity boats passing through the waters in front of an area full of survivors who are stranded and in need of supplies, refusing to help. They are hosting snorkeling tours.
Really think about, try your best to actually picture over two thousand people unhoused and in need of shelter, with nothing but the clothes on their backs and nothing to return to. Understand that the island, stolen land, is littered with hotels full of air conditioned of rooms with beds and showers and toilets, each fully equipped to host hundreds of families for weeks, turning these people away because they’re booked up with tourists who refuse to leave.
And understand that these tourists were offered free transport to return home or be hosted on other islands. Free. Courtesy of local tax dollars. 4,000 wealthy tourists were offered free flights shelter on Oahu and begged to leave the island, BEFORE the survivors were given shelter.
And enough still insisted on remaining and carrying out their vacations that people are left without shelter and resources while they enjoy “their stay in paradise”.
[Edit]: This current situation, and this type of tourist behavior is horrifying beyond words. In other circumstances, the tourism situation is much more complicated, and I need to ask that people do not add on to this post unless they are local.
i think my fav thing about griffin as a dm is that instead of going “unfortunately the ooze is immune to slashing damage :/” he says “if you were making a pb&j sandwich and you dropped some jelly on the counter, would you take a knife and just start cutting at it you dumb son of a bitch”
SPOCK: Your argument precludes the possibility of a no-win scenario. KIRK: I don’t believe in no-win scenarios. SPOCK: Then, not only did you violate the rules, you also failed to understand the principle lesson.
To recap: a plaintiff who had not been injured brought a lawsuit against a person who does not exist and SCOTUS took the case so the Christian Nationalist majority could create a law that would never pass Congress, to achieve a result that is wildly out of step with what the majority of Americans want and support.
This shouldn’t just raise flags; it should lead to impeachments.
These six unelected and unelectable politicians cosplaying as Justices have no authority, legal, ethical, moral, or otherwise, that can’t be immediately taken back by the people via our representatives in Congress. We MUST force them to hear us.
every day i wake up and remember steve quite literally asked bucky to kill him. like he actually told bucky to finish it because he was with him until the end. he acknowledged it was the end. he stopped fighting back for the first time in his life. he finally threw the shield down after years of doubting his purpose as captain america because he didn’t want to have to hurt bucky. he begged bucky to not make him have to fight him at all because he couldn’t let people die but as soon as he’d saved everyone else he gave up on himself and was planning on going down on the helicarrier with bucky. he freed bucky from being trapped under the wreckage even though he knew bucky was still going to try and kill him. he decided he’d rather let himself die at bucky’s hands than live in a world where bucky didn’t remember him. like. what the hell.
That shield was meant to protect Bucky, not to hurt him.
Such a good analogy for “privatizing the profits, but socializing the losses.”
Taxpayers, not the wealthy owners of OceanGate, will be paying the millions of dollars in costs for the search and rescue—and I almost wouldn’t have a problem with that (the coastguard rescues hapless people every day, and I don’t think that regular citizens should be forced to pay for their own rescues, because saving people is what a society should come together and do).
But the owners of OceanGate not only knew of the risks, they eschewed any kind of government regulation (like having an emergency location beacon that would have made the search far easier) because they said it would inhibit growth and profits. And I can’t help but believe that the coastguard and the navy and all of the other public agencies, are searching just a little bit longer and a little bit harder, because it’s rich people who are missing.
And don’t even get me started on how Greece’s coastguard is most likely responsible for the murder of hundreds of refugees, or how Italy and much of Europe have made it national policy for their coastguards to not help refugees at sea.
Anyway, it’s well past time for more people to start seriously thinking about how our society always bails out banks and wealthy billionaires, but tells poor people to exercise better judgment and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
