The camp that became a country by Marja Heikkinen

There is a soft, persistent hum inside the Rohingya refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, a sound stitched together from monsoon winds, human breathing, and the dull throb of waiting. Waiting is its own weather system there, heavy and humid, impossible to escape. More than a million people, an entire nation without a nation, have lived inside the world’s largest refugee encampment for years, long enough for children to grow into teenagers who have never seen the land their parents still call home.

And yet the world treats this place as a paused story, a tragic footnote with no plot progression. The headlines have thinned. The promises have thinned further. And now the aid is thinning too.

When funding shrinks in a place where everything depends on it, food, water, medicine, dignity, the consequences unfold slowly at first and then all at once. Shelters that once at least pretended to be sturdier than the storms are no longer provided to new arrivals. Families step off trucks or trudge across flooded paths only to discover there is no space for them, not even a tarpaulin or bamboo frame to call their own. It is difficult to imagine something more humiliating than being stateless, but being stateless and shelterless may come close.

The international community, that elusive chorus of well-meaning voices, often speaks of compassion in the abstract. But compassion, to the Rohingya, has become an increasingly unreliable currency. It evaporates when politics blow hot. It disappears when donors look elsewhere. The Rohingya the forgotten people, the displaced, the unwelcome, have learned that abandonment happens not with shouts but with silences. Long, bureaucratic, politely phrased silences.

The camps were never intended to last this long. They were meant to be temporary, a humanitarian bridge until Myanmar’s government faced its own reflection and allowed the Rohingya to return home safely. But home is now an idea more than a geography. Half-destroyed villages, scorched earth, and political inertia make return not only unrealistic but dangerous. And so the camp grows into something resembling a city, though a city without rights, without permanence, without the basic infrastructure that transforms a cluster of shelters into a place where human beings can imagine a future.

There are informal schools where volunteer teachers try to convince restless children that learning still matters. There are makeshift clinics where doctors must play a daily game of triage because they simply do not have enough supplies. There are markets, tiny ones, where bartering serves as the closest thing to an economy. The Rohingya have done what all displaced people eventually do: they’ve built a life inside the ruins of what was taken from them.

It is fashionable in some circles to speak of “compassion fatigue,” as though empathy is a natural resource prone to depletion. But fatigue is a luxury the Rohingya do not have. Nor is it a luxury afforded to the Bangladeshi communities hosting them, who shoulder the environmental strain, the political complications, and the economic frustrations of absorbing a population larger than many countries’ capitals. Host nations often receive praise for their “generosity,” but praise does not rebuild eroding hillsides or fund schools or address the simmering tensions that arise whenever resources grow scarce.

To walk through the camps is to feel the contradiction that defines the Rohingya condition: they are both hyper-visible and utterly unseen. The scale of their displacement is enormous, undeniable, impossible to ignore and yet the world has managed to look away. There is no powerful lobby advocating for them, no geopolitical advantage in championing their cause. They drift in the margins of global concern, a crisis that refuses to end but also refuses to excite the urgency needed to solve it.

What does it mean, then, to insist on hope? In many Rohingya households, hope has become a quiet act of rebellion. Mothers teach their children stories from a homeland the kids have never touched. Men gather to discuss community leadership, imagining systems of order inside disorder. Teenagers, who should be flirting, dreaming, discovering, gather in cramped rooms to learn English or Burmese, preparing for a future that has not been offered to them. It is astonishing, almost unreasonable, the human instinct to imagine a tomorrow even when today collapses around you.

An opinion column is supposed to offer a point of view, a prescription, maybe even a solution. But the Rohingya crisis resists quick solutions. It asks instead for endurance, for the mundane work of sustained attention. It requires the international community to resist the temptation of distraction. To remember that a million displaced people do not simply disappear because our focus shifts to another crisis.

The truth is that moral responsibility doesn’t expire. It doesn’t diminish because the news cycle moved on. The Rohingya are still there, in the tarpaulin-and-bamboo labyrinth of Cox’s Bazar, still listening to the monsoon winds and the bureaucratic silences. They are still waiting.

And perhaps the most radical thing we can do, the most human thing, is to stop pretending that waiting is an acceptable substitute for a future.

Embers of a false safety by Mary Long

Last week’s tragedy at Wang Fuk Court in Hong Kong, where at least 151 people lost their lives and dozens more remain missing, has been officially met with arrests. Thirteen people, including construction-company executives and consultants, now face manslaughter charges.

But while those arrests offer a measure of accountability, they also expose a deeper rot: the corruption and systemic neglect embedded in the city’s infrastructure oversight and a government too indifferent to property and human safety when profit and paperwork come first.

Residents had been raising the alarm for over a year. They warned that the renovation covering the towers was reckless, bamboo scaffolding wrapped in cheap nylon netting, foam-panel cladding, sealed windows, and non-functional fire alarms.

Authorities ruled the risk “relatively low.” Inspections were carried out. Notices were issued. But enforcement was absent. Contractors cut corners. Inspectors looked away. And the city carried on. Until the netting caught fire and flames raced upward like ill wind through dry brush. Within hours, seven towers were enveloped. Stairwells, corridors, entire flats: blackened husks. Bodies found on rooftops. Others turned to ash.

This was not a freak accident. It was a catastrophe written long before that first spark, carved in the ledgers of profit and malice, smoothed over by bureaucracy.

Yes, it matters that construction bosses and engineers face criminal charges. They are complicit. In a morally honest city, they would have been stopped the moment substandard materials were spotted.

But what about the layers above them? The regulators who failed to act. The political milieu that requires housing quotas and schedules more than safety. The legal and institutional inertia that turns certifications and inspections into cosmetic theatre.

By focusing on a handful of culprits, we risk mistaking the symptom for the disease. The arrests may quiet the outrage but they do nothing to change the machinery that made this inferno possible.

Scrimping on fire-safe scaffolding mesh, punching out foam-board window panels, sealing alarms behind walls: these are not accidents. They are business decisions, calculated attempts to maximize profit at the expense of human lives.

And in a city where real estate is king, where density is prized, and where political expedience trumps public safety, it is unsurprising these cost-cutting measures go unchecked. But it is unforgivable.

This tragedy should never have happened. It was not “bad luck” it was bad governance. A collective, institutional lethargy. A façade of compliance papered over by greed and inefficiency.

If Hong Kong’s leadership believes that locking up a handful of contractors will end this chapter, they misunderstand the crisis. The people who died and the survivors whose lives were shattered, did not perish because of a few bad actors. They died because the entire system failed them.

What is needed now is a sweeping, transparent inquiry not only into who cut corners, but into why and how those corners ever existed in the first place. An overhaul of construction safety laws, fire-code enforcement, tenant protections and the political will to enforce them.

Otherwise, when the next renovation deal comes along, the same illegality will return. The same corners will be cut. And the next fire won’t be a tragedy. It’ll be a guarantee.

In the smouldering remains of Wang Fuk Court, the city witnessed more than a disaster. It glimpsed a truth: profit and power in Hong Kong have too often trumped human life. Holding a few individuals responsible is not enough. If the city does not confront its rot, in its infrastructure, its oversight, its values, then it will remain a place where the next fire is not a possibility, but a certainty.

Pardon as a king-maker by Mia Rodríguez

When Juan Orlando Hernández walked out of that West Virginia prison, a man once branded as the architect of a narco-state, it wasn’t just the closing of a sentence, it was the opening of a new chapter of interference in the politics of his homeland. The timing of his pardon, just days before the Honduran election, was too convenient to be accidental. And the reverberations aren’t just moral or legal: they’re deeply political and deeply destabilizing for the democratic future of Honduras.

Hernández’s conviction in March 2024 was seismic: found guilty of conspiring to import hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States, and of orchestrating a web of corruption that turned Honduras into cartel ground zero. The 45-year sentence was meant to stand as a warning, a signal that even kings can be shackled when they traffic in human misery for protection and profit. Instead, the pardon erased that warning. With one stroke, the message became: power, even tainted, still commands protection.

And the beneficiary of that protection? Nasry Asfura, a candidate of Hernández’s own party, the right-wing National Party. Asfura, once a two-term mayor of the capital and latterly an underdog candidate, suddenly found himself buoyed by U.S. endorsement and the resurrection of his political Godfather.

From a moral standpoint, this is corruption writ large: a former president convicted of blood-money crimes is now freed to enjoy the benefits he once wielded. But from a strategic, diplomatic viewpoint, the move is even more alarming. The pardon and the accompanying endorsement weren’t signals of absolution, but of leverage. With Honduras’s economy deeply tied to U.S. aid, and remittances making up a large chunk of GDP, the promise of favor from Washington becomes a powerful tool.

Asfura’s early lead, by mere hundreds of votes, now looks less like a fluke and more like the product of a carefully orchestrated foreign intervention. If the pardon had come after the vote, it might have been dismissed by some as irrelevant. But delivered in the final hours of the campaign, it had the force of a political accelerator and it may already have changed the outcome.

For many Hondurans, the pardon is a betrayal. It is a message that criminality pays, that foreign powers will bail out their favored scoundrels and that justice, can be overridden by geopolitics. For others likely enough to sway the vote, it is a sign of protection and promise: under Asfura, they hope, stability, U.S. money and remittances to communities will continue.

The cost, however, is immense. Democracy is not just about ballots cast; it’s about legitimacy, rule of law, and the sense that the people’s will is sovereign, not foreign dictation. With this pardon, the sovereignty of Honduras has been compromised, its elections rendered suspect, and its future potentially hostage to the whims of foreign power brokers.

Moreover, this pardon highlights a double standard: while the U.S. continues to prosecute lower-level traffickers and launch anti-drug operations in Latin America, it now shields one of the most notorious kingpins in the region, simply because he serves U.S. geopolitical aims. Hypocrisy has rarely looked so brazen, or so destructive.

In years to come, historians may ask: did this pardon mark the moment when Honduras traded its fragile democracy for foreign-backed oligarchy? Did it plant the seed of cynicism so deep that no future election could ever feel free or fair again? Because what we are witnessing is not just a return of a man, it is the return of an entire political ecosystem built on impunity, drug money, and foreign influence.

For Honduras, the question is no longer just who wins this election, it is what kind of country they will live in afterward. Will rights, justice, and real representation matter? Or will the next government be just another puppet dancing to outside strings?

And for the rest of the world watching: if pardons become tools of election meddling, if former narco-leaders remerge as kingmakers, then the war on narco-corruption becomes not just hollow, it becomes a farce.

The paranoid mirror by Felix Laursen

Netflix’s insistence that its new documentary on Sean “Diddy” Combs produced, with theatrical relish by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, is “not a hit piece or an act of retribution” has the tonal quality of a restaurant assuring you that the chicken is definitely not undercooked. The very need to deny it invites suspicion. But suspicion is the operating currency of this entire story, hip-hop royalty, power struggles, masculinity-as-currency, and the psychological terrain where paranoia begins to look an awful lot like pattern recognition.

And here’s the thing, just because 50 Cent may be frothing with a decade’s worth of vendettas doesn’t mean the man formerly known as Puff Daddy is an innocent misunderstood mogul caught in someone else’s obsession. Paranoia, as the saying goes, is sometimes the only sane response in a world full of knives. The paranoid may exaggerate, but the danger is often real.

The documentary arrives at a moment when Diddy’s mythological glow has cracked like lacquer left in the sun. Years of whispers have hardened into allegations and lawsuits, the once-unshakeable empire suddenly feeling more like a carefully built dam with too many emerging leaks. His relevance in the culture remains undeniable nearly thirty years ago he defined shiny-suit excess, built Bad Boy into a cultural axis, and coronated himself as hip-hop’s black Gatsby. But mythologies are fragile once scrutiny begins. And here, scrutiny comes packaged with the unmistakable scent of vengeance.

50 Cent has long been one of rap’s most gifted antagonists, a man who treats feuding as performance art. His public persona is equal parts Shakespearean fool and neighbourhood instigator; he’s the kid who pokes the beehive not because he wants honey, but because he enjoys watching the hive react. Of course he would be the one to produce this documentary. Of course he’d deliver it with a smirk. One almost imagines him sending Netflix executives a bottle of champagne labelled “Wouldn’t Miss This for the World.”

Yet dismissing the film as merely 50’s revenge fantasy is too convenient, too tidy. It misses the complicated cultural moment we’re in: a simultaneous reckoning and spectacle, where celebrity misdeeds, real, alleged, invented, embellished, are processed through the twin engines of social justice and entertainment hunger. The audience wants the truth, yes. But it also wants the mess. Netflix, always attuned to appetites, responds accordingly.

Diddy, for his part, casts the documentary as a malicious distortion cooked up by a man who has spent years publicly needling him. This is not a new playbook; powerful men often describe their critics as obsessed, unstable, jealous. The irony is that in hip-hop's competitive mythology, obsession and instability are also signs of devotion to the art, to the hustle, to the image of relentless ambition. Hip-hop has always thrived on conflict; only now the conflict is being reframed through moral lenses. The same culture that once celebrated beef now scrutinizes its implications. Audiences who cheered diss tracks in the 2000s now discuss power dynamics on podcasts. Somewhere, Tupac and Biggie are shaking their heads.

What makes this specific drama so intoxicating, and so uneasy, is the triangular geometry of perception. There is Diddy, the mogul now facing accusations heavy enough to change the narrative arc of his legacy. There is 50 Cent, the provocateur who sees the perfect opportunity to twist the narrative knife. And then there is Netflix, the world’s most powerful curator of public memory, insisting with a straight face that this is not, absolutely not, a hit job.

It becomes a hall of mirrors. Diddy accuses 50 Cent of manufacturing exaggerations; 50 Cent accuses Diddy of hiding behind charm; Netflix insists it is merely documenting reality; and the audience, ever hungry, scrolls through its apps, trying to decide who is gaslighting whom.

But the deeper question and the one that makes this documentary culturally significant rather than merely tabloid fodder, is whether the emerging portrait of Diddy reflects a consequence delayed rather than conjured. For years, hip-hop was dominated by men who understood charm as camouflage, charisma as currency, and business acumen as absolution. Many built empires brick by brick on the backs of people whose names were never recorded, whose stories were never told. It is only recently that the margins have begun to speak.

That Netflix now steps into this ecosystem with a glossy production is not surprising. Streaming platforms have become the new courts of public opinion, where narratives are shaped, repackaged, and fed to viewers seeking moral clarity in the familiar rhythms of bingeable content. But moral clarity rarely survives entertainment packaging. Documentaries, particularly of this genre, rely on their own seductions: suspense, revelation, emotional arc, catharsis. In that sense, even truth becomes a kind of performance.

So is the documentary a hit piece? Or is it a finally-aired truth? Perhaps it’s both. Perhaps it’s neither. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. What matters is the cultural x-ray it provides: of power that calcified into entitlement, of rivalry that hardened into obsession, of a public ready to devour yet another fallen icon, and of a media landscape only too eager to facilitate the feast.

The paranoid mind sees enemies everywhere. But sometimes the world truly is full of them. And in the case of Sean “Diddy” Combs, the real question may not be whether the documentary is driven by vengeance, but whether vengeance and truth have finally, inevitably become indistinguishable.

Ma-Siri & Alexa #114 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Ma-Siri is a mother and a grandmother with a mechanical companion
searching for the meaning of life.

For more Ma-Siri & Alexa, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Shadows on the waterline by Timothy Davies

There are moments in American foreign policy when an event, small, localized, and almost provincial in its initial framing, illuminates a larger moral universe. The Venezuela boat strikes, spoken of with a kind of offhand certainty by commentators like Pete Hegseth, had that uncanny quality: the sense that the incident was less an aberration than a glimpse into a darker, ongoing pattern. It felt, unmistakably, like a crime hiding in plain sight. And the longer one sits with that feeling, the more unsettling the larger question becomes, how many other quiet crimes, half-buried or never reported, were committed under the Trump administration’s foreign policy banner?

The story of the boat strikes, covert interference presented with all the subtlety of a fist in fog, fits neatly into a governing worldview that thrived on the idea that what is done in the shadows is justified so long as it serves a larger spectacle. The Trump years cultivated a foreign policy aesthetic shaped by improvisation, vengeance, and the barely disguised thrill of rule-breaking. Even those who approved of the administration’s posture abroad rarely claimed it was careful. Or lawful. Or consistent. Only that it was bold and unbound. And boldness, as we learned, can be an excellent hiding place.

Consider the psychology at play: an administration that reveled in open defiance was simultaneously the one most adept at burying the quiet misdeeds. A public scandal, Ukraine, for example, blazed bright enough to conceal the operations never spoken of, never confirmed, never even fully whispered. If the flamboyant transgression becomes the news cycle, the technical violations glide by unnoticed, like boats in low light.

The Venezuela operation embodies that contradiction. For years, Washington hawks fantasized about great geopolitical confrontations, but what actually unfolded were smaller, stranger, and far more deniable mechanisms of interference, mercenary plots, covert pressure campaigns, oddball paramilitary excursions conducted with the moral discipline of a fraternity prank gone geopolitical. When such incidents broke into public awareness, they did so not because the system worked, but because the recklessness was too large to contain. It wasn’t the scrutiny that failed. It was the secrecy.

This is the quiet terror of reflecting on that era, not the scandals we know but the possibility of the ones we don’t.

Foreign policy under the Trump administration functioned as a kind of parallel theatre, one stage in the light, where the president issued bombastic threats on Twitter and praised strongmen with the enthusiasm of a man congratulating himself in the mirror; and another stage entirely, deeper backstage, where hastily planned operations proceeded without transparency, oversight, or even coherent strategy. The more chaotic the public show became, the easier it was to slip other actions through the cracks, disguised as routine, as whispers, as minor footnotes of the national security apparatus.

People speak nostalgically of the “adults in the room,” the ones who were supposed to curb excesses and keep the country from drifting into disaster. But such talk is itself an acknowledgment that excesses were constant and disaster always possible. If the Venezuela boat strikes felt like a crime long before the media caught up to them, it is because the moral disarray of those years trained us to expect wrongdoing as a background hum.

What was done to Venezuela was not done in a vacuum. It was part of a broader ethos that treated foreign nations, especially those already wounded economically or politically as chess pieces to be flicked across the board. The administration’s foreign policy was less “America First” than America-unrestrained, operating by impulses rather than principles. In that environment, the question of how many additional covert actions crossed legal or ethical lines becomes less hypothetical and more inevitable.

And so we return to the uneasy question, how many more crimes? Not metaphorical crimes, not ideological disagreements, but concrete violations, international laws bent or broken, human consequences ignored in the name of spectacle, operations conducted not with the meticulous precision of a statesman, but with the erratic fervor of someone seeking quick victory without accountability.

Even now, years removed, the full picture remains obscured. The archives have not been fully opened. The oversight mechanisms remain weakened. Many of the individuals who orchestrated these operations have retreated into think-tank anonymity or media commentary, where the past can be reframed as policy rather than misconduct. But the pattern persists like a watermark: the administration’s loudest actions were often its least dangerous; the quiet ones, its most alarming.

There is a temptation to view the entire Trump era as an anomaly, a fever that broke, a disruption now fading into the political periphery. But foreign policy leaves residue. It lingers in damaged alliances, destabilized regions, and the chilling example that a president can conduct clandestine activities without consequence. The next administration inclined toward secrecy or aggression will inherit both the blueprint and the precedent.

The Venezuela boat strikes are thus more than a footnote. They are a warning flare. They invite us to reconsider the gap between what we witnessed and what was truly done. They remind us that a nation’s moral standing can be eroded not only by the scandals that dominate headlines, but by the operations quietly carried out in forgotten coves, unmonitored channels, and diplomatic darkrooms.

America will not know the full cost for years. But we already know enough to stop pretending that legality and morality were only occasionally breached. The real story, the one barely told and only half-glimpsed, is how the shadow operations became the norm, and how easily a democracy can lose track of the crimes committed in its name when the spectacle is loud enough to drown out the whispers of the waterline.

A taxing return to tradition by Jemma Norman

When Rachel Reeves stood at the despatch box on Wednesday to deliver her second Budget, she announced what many in Westminster grudgingly call “realism.” The country, she warned, faced a gaping hole in public finances, a shortfall of roughly £30 billion, a fiscal chasm that demanded blunt instruments: tax hikes, spending cuts in some areas, but also renewed support for welfare and services. It is a Budget shaped by necessity. Yet again, under the banner of Labour’s social conscience, ordinary people are being asked to pay.

At a glance, there are green shoots. The abolition of the two-child benefit cap, long condemned as punitive, signals a return to Labour’s roots: a safety net for children who, through no fault of their own, were victims of austerity by another name. For low-income families with multiple children, that is undoubtedly welcome. Likewise, modest efforts to curb energy costs, freeze rail fares, and shore up public services acknowledge that millions struggle with cost-of-living pressures. In that sense, the rhetoric matches the humane aspiration: fairness, equity, the cradle-to-grave grammar of the modern welfare state.

But the devil, as ever, lies in the details. The main mechanism for raising revenue does not come from targeting the super-rich alone, but from sweeping tax-threshold freezes, pension-relief cuts, new levies on property, savings, and even electric cars. As wages creep up, more people will find themselves dragged into higher tax bands. A generation of savers, planning with pensions, ISAs, or careful investments will now face shrinking returns. The burden falls heavily on the “squeezed middle,” not on the rentier elite or offshore capital.

The result: a paradox. A Budget that cloaks itself in Labour compassion yet pursues a form of redistribution that is deeply regressive. It punishes thrift. It penalises aspiration. And it risks entrenching among working families a sense of betrayal rather than solidarity. For all its moral posturing, this might just be high-tax conservatism dressed up in red.

We may nod at the scrapping of the benefits cap, but what about the subtle erosion of hope? Pension contributions, the bedrock of long-term security for millions, are being dismantled piece by piece. Homeownership, long heralded as a path to stability, is threatened by new levies and surging property duties. The Budget asks more of the many so that the state can do more for a few; but any sensible observer must ask: has it really delivered justice, or simply managed to widen the definitions of “taxable”?

Then there is the matter of political pretence. Only last year, this same government pledged not to raise taxes on working people. Now, almost every lever has been pulled: thresholds frozen, reliefs curtailed, new charges for pension savers, landlords, electric-car owners. The language may have shifted — “contribution,” “duty,” “fair share,” but the effect is unmistakable. The promise smells of betrayal.

Does this reflect what the people wanted? It’s hard to believe so, not the people who start every morning staring down spiralling bills, who struggle with mortgages or cling to modest pensions. The polling suggests something else: a mixture of resignation, cynicism, and anger. Many hoped for an end to austerity, for fair pay, for a break from the perpetual squeeze. Instead they got a recycling of old burdens, under a different flag.

What we are witnessing is not a decisive turning point, not a reinvention of the social contract but a tired rerun. For a party that once stood for the downtrodden, this Budget feels like capitulation. A capitulation not to markets or bond-holders, but to arithmetic. The numbers don’t lie. Yet they also don’t care: about dignity, hope, generational fairness.

One could argue: at least it is honest. Better to raise taxes than to borrow recklessly or cut basic services. Perhaps. But honesty does not absolve cruelty. And budgeting is not merely arithmetic. It should be about value what we choose to hold dear when we balance the books. In that ledger, pensions, savings, and the modest dreams of working families are as legitimate as the welfare of children.

So yes — the black hole had to be filled. But this Budget does not fill it with vision. It fills it with old burdens, with stealth taxes, with deferred pain. And this in the name of tradition may mark the moment when Labour traded its soul for the books.

In the freezing of thresholds, the cutting of pension reliefs, the stealth levies lies not only optics, but a quiet unravelling of trust. Maybe the people wanted fairness not this.

Cuts, contortions and the cost of being human by Shanna Shepard

International Day of Persons with Disabilities

Every year on December 3rd, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities arrives with the soft thud of a well-meaning holiday, acknowledged, applauded, and then swiftly shelved for the next twelve months. In 2025, however, the day feels heavier, carrying the weight of a global pattern that many prefer not to name: the quiet normalization of cutting care for those who need it most.

Let’s be honest. We have entered an era where disability rights are praised in speeches and undermined in budgets. The tension between rhetoric and reality has never been so stark, and people with disabilities are expected perversely to be grateful that the contradiction is merely awkward rather than lethal. But gratitude is difficult to summon when the institutions that claim to protect you do so with one hand while reaching for a red pen with the other.

This year, governments across continents have discovered a new enthusiasm for “efficiency,” the kind that finds its purest expression in healthcare cuts. The euphemisms are familiar: streamlining, restructuring, modernizing. But for disabled people, these are not abstract policy terms; they manifest as lost services, longer waits, shuttered clinics, withdrawn supports. In some places, “efficiency” has meant replacing home-care visits with phone check-ins, as if loneliness and isolation were simply technical issues that could be toggled on a screen.

Of course, discrimination has never needed austerity to survive, but the two make exquisite companions. Cutting care for disabled people is easily justified because disability is still widely understood, though rarely admitted as a personal burden rather than a societal failure. The disabled person is expected to endure, adjust, self-improve, or at least remain discreetly out of view. And when their needs become politically inconvenient, the narrative shifts: We simply don’t have the resources right now. As if dignity were a luxury item.

The cruelest part is that disabled people are often painted as “resilient,” a word that has been polished into a compliment but functions more like an absolution. If they are resilient, then the rest of us can relax. Resilience is comforting precisely because it allows us to imagine that cuts won’t hurt them as much as they actually do. It implies that support is optional, a courtesy rather than a right. It transforms suffering into a kind of noble achievement.

But try telling that to the people who rely on mobility aids that are now months late due to procurement freezes. Or to the families who have lost speech therapy access because the program that funded it was quietly phased out. Or to the chronically ill patients whose lifesaving medications have been moved out of coverage lists, replaced by cheaper alternatives that work fine—if one happens not to have the disability in question.

Discrimination takes subtler forms, too: the doctor who assumes a disabled patient’s symptoms are simply “part of their condition,” the employer who swears that remote work is impossible despite years of evidence to the contrary; the school that insists it supports inclusion while refusing to provide aides, devices, or training. These small violences accumulate, forming a sediment of exclusion that becomes difficult to dislodge.

What makes 2025 particularly striking is not that these injustices exist, they always have but that they are becoming increasingly, almost theatrically, normalized. The public conversation has learned to shrug. It is, after all, easier to ignore something once enough people begin ignoring it together. Disability discrimination has drifted into the background noise of civic life, drowned out by more fashionable outrages.

Yet history suggests that societies are revealed not in their crises but in their care: whom they choose to protect, and at what cost. The current trajectory reveals a troubling truth, much of the world is deeply uncomfortable with disability, not because it is rare, but because it is universal. Everyone is a future member of the same club, and that inevitability carries a discomfort we would rather outsource to policy documents.

Using International Day of Persons with Disabilities as an annual showcase of compassion feels increasingly performative when the rest of the year erodes the systems that make compassion tangible. This is not a matter of resource scarcity; it is a matter of political will, imagination, and empathy, qualities that are apparently easier to express in speeches than spreadsheets.

The irony is that investing in disability support is not, and has never been, charity. It is infrastructure. It is workforce policy. It is family policy. It is education policy. It is a collective insurance plan not just for the people who need accommodations today, but for everyone who will eventually need them tomorrow. Cuts to disability care are cuts to societal resilience, though that word is rarely applied where it belongs.

So how do we honour this day without falling into the trap of ceremonial concern? By refusing to treat disability as an optional line item. By recognizing discrimination not as an unfortunate side effect of modern life but as a structural choice. By insisting that the right to exist with dignity does not ebb and flow with budget cycles. And by remembering, perhaps most urgently, that disabled people do not need resilience as much as they need justice.

In 2025, celebrating this day requires more than symbolic gestures. It requires admitting that the fabric of disability rights is fraying and that we have grown far too comfortable watching the threads loosen. It requires discomfort, the kind that forces introspection and, ideally, change.

And it requires most of all, a collective refusal to let austerity masquerade as inevitability.

If the International Day of Persons with Disabilities is to mean anything this year, it must be a reminder that the measure of a society is not how it honours disability on a calendar but how it supports disabled people on every other day of the year.

Screws & Chips #116 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

In a galaxy far, far away, intelligence demonstrated by screws and chips,
boldly gone where no robot has gone before!

For more Screws & Chips, HERE!
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How Europe’s center-left flirted with the dark side of immigration politics by Marja Heikkinen

For years, socialists, social democrats, and the broader European center-left have struggled with a paralyzing identity crisis. Their traditional voters, industrial workers, lower-middle-class families, the quietly anxious middle strata who once trusted left-leaning parties to defend economic security, have drifted toward nationalist and right-populist movements. In response, many on the left have asked a provocative question: Is Denmark’s hard-line stance on immigration the accidental blueprint for center-left survival? And, in darker corners of the debate: Is turning “evil” against immigration now the only way to stay electorally alive?

It is a question soaked in discomfort, ideological betrayal, and uneasy political arithmetic. And yet it is not going away.

Denmark’s Social Democrats once embodied textbook progressive ideals: welfare universalism, internationalist empathy, moral confidence in the strength of an open society. Then came the seismic political shift. Under Mette Frederiksen, the party embraced some of Europe’s most restrictive immigration policies, policies that rivalled, and in some cases exceeded, those of the right. The move shocked Europe’s center-left, but it also produced an inconvenient truth: the Social Democrats won. They stabilized their base. They proved that a party could wrap a hardened immigration stance inside a still-generous welfare state and remain, at least nominally, progressive.

Other struggling European center-left parties began to look northward with a mix of envy and dread.

But what Denmark pulled off is not a simple trick of political triangulation. It is a philosophical contortion: a socialist party defending a welfare state by walling it off from perceived external pressures. The logic runs like this: Our social model is precious. It only works if we maintain tight social cohesion. That cohesion is threatened by immigration. Therefore, in the name of protecting the welfare state, we must keep people out. It is a reversal of the traditional progressive instinct, which imagined that prosperity could expand to accommodate newcomers.

The question, now, is whether other European center-left parties should follow.

The temptation is obvious. Voters who feel economically or culturally vulnerable often respond to politicians who promise control over borders, over identity, over the pace of societal change. The right has capitalized on this for two decades. Why shouldn’t the left borrow the message, soften the edges, and wrap it in a cardigan of well-meaning social protection?

Yet beneath the surface of this strategy lies a moral corrosion that cannot be politely brushed aside. If the left embraces restrictive immigration as electoral salvation, what remains of its animating ethos? A left that turns immigration into a tool, an acceptable casualty in a larger war for political relevance—risks losing its soul even as it wins votes.

But Europe’s center-left crisis is not just moral; it is structural. Economic transformations, automation, and globalization have hollowed out the old working-class coalition. Social democrats were slow to adapt. They offered technocratic reassurances while right-wing populists offered passion. They defended the European project while voters felt unheard. By the time center-left parties recognized their error, trust had evaporated.

It is within this vacuum that the “Danish model” has become both a warning and a lifeline.

If the left is to consider immigration policy as a survival tactic, it must first examine whether Denmark’s success is truly replicable. Denmark is small, cohesive, linguistically and culturally unified, and deeply consensus-oriented. Its welfare system is robust, its institutions respected. The Danish political psyche places a premium on conformity and equality, conditions that make restrictive immigration policies politically digestible in a way they may not be elsewhere.

Transplanting this model to larger, more diverse countries such as Germany, France, or even Spain would not be a clean operation. In fact, it might produce the opposite effect: inflaming societal divisions, normalizing xenophobia, and lending legitimacy to the far-right’s core narrative rather than neutralizing it.

And yet the center-left cannot pretend the immigration issue will evaporate if ignored.

So what would a morally defensible, electorally viable alternative look like?

It begins with honesty, an admission that the “open-door idealism” of the early 2010s collided with capacity limits, integration failures, and public fears that were not wholly irrational. The left cannot simply tell voters they’re wrong and expect gratitude. It must acknowledge that borders exist, that states manage them, and that immigration policy must be grounded in both humanity and realism.

The center-left can if it chooses, craft a narrative that does not scapegoat immigrants but still addresses anxieties. It can focus on competence rather than cruelty: smarter integration policy, faster asylum procedures, firm but fair border control, and a renewed emphasis on labour-market inclusion. It can frame immigration as manageable, not catastrophic; as an investment, not a threat.

What it cannot do is out-right the right. Not ethically, and not sustainably. Normalizing cruelty corrodes political culture. And once the left walks through that door, the right will always be waiting with something harsher.

Denmark’s model may have delivered short-term survival, but it also carved a permanent scar into the ideological map of European social democracy. The question every center-left party must ask itself is not only whether it wants to win but what kind of victory it seeks. A hollow victory built on borrowed fear may preserve seats, but it will not rebuild trust.

The real blueprint for survival lies not in turning “evil” against immigration, but in reclaiming political courage: the courage to speak plainly about challenges without surrendering principles, to address voters’ concerns without validating prejudice, and to design policies that balance solidarity with pragmatism.

If the center-left cannot find a way to do this, then Denmark’s path may indeed become its default future, not because it is right, but because it is easy. And yet easy paths rarely lead to renewal. They lead, slowly and quietly, to surrender.

Chains that change shape by Virginia Robertson

Why the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery Still Belongs to the 21st Century

Every year, the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery appears on the calendar like a stern reminder that humanity has a very short memory. We commemorate victories—laws passed, chains broken, tyrannies overthrown and then, with disquieting ease, assume the work is finished. But the 21st century excels at reinvention, and slavery is no exception. The chains have changed shape. They are lighter, quieter, digital, contractual, and in many cases, self-concealing. We are living in an age where exploitation dresses up in the language of opportunity and where “freedom” has been reduced to a marketing slogan.

We prefer to think slavery lives only in textbooks and the darker corners of documentaries. It is more comfortable that way. But anyone who has spent time listening, really listening to migrant workers, asylum seekers, or the uncounted army of domestic labourers knows otherwise. Modern slavery is not an aberration; it is an industry. Human trafficking is its most lucrative wing. And while the global economy prides itself on efficiency, it has been equally efficient at absorbing these exploitative systems, smoothing their sharp edges until the atrocities blend seamlessly into supply chains and labour markets.

The International Day for the Abolition of Slavery forces us to confront an inconvenient truth: liberation did not end in the 19th century. It mutated in the 20th and metastasized in the 21st. Today’s traffickers do not need whips and auctions; they have paperwork, debt, forged promises, and the anonymity of the internet. They exploit borders, wars, fragile states, and desperate families. Their victims rarely appear on news cycles, unless discovered in mass graves, shipping containers, or brothels masquerading as wellness studios.

We must resist the urge to interpret modern slavery as something happening “elsewhere.” The geography of exploitation has never respected borders. In fact, the wealthier the country, the more invisible the forced labour tends to be. It hides in the guest room of a well-to-do family employing an undocumented woman under the illusion of kindness. It hides in farms worked by labourers whose passports are conveniently “held for safekeeping.” It hides in construction projects where the workers' names are unknown and their injuries unreported. And, most perniciously, it hides in our digital marketplaces, where human trafficking has found its most streamlined recruiting tool.

This is not simply a moral issue; it is a structural one. We live in a world that rewards exploitation when it is disguised well enough. The 21st century has mastered the art of outsourcing responsibility. As long as the consumer does not see the suffering behind the product, the system functions smoothly. If slavery once relied on physical force, today it thrives on social invisibility, economic vulnerability, and our collective appetite for convenience without consequence.

Yet the conversation around human trafficking is often trapped in clichés. We talk about “raising awareness,” as if awareness alone could dismantle systems that prey on inequity. Awareness without accountability is performative empathy. What we need instead is discomfort, a willingness to look without flinching at how our own societies, our own economies, and yes, even our own daily choices intersect with exploitation. We need to abandon the comforting narrative that trafficking is the result of individual bad actors. It is the outcome of global systems that treat human beings as expendable units of labour.

The International Day for the Abolition of Slavery should force us to reckon not only with moral outrage but with policy and power. If nations truly wanted to confront trafficking, they would strengthen labour protections, enforce transparency in supply chains, provide safe migration pathways, and ensure that victims are treated as victims, not criminals. They would dismantle the loopholes that allow companies to outsource responsibility for labour abuses. They would fund shelters, legal aid, and long-term support for survivors rather than stage photo-op raids that rescue without rebuilding.

But perhaps the most underexplored aspect of modern slavery is its psychological dimension. The old slave systems relied on the overt denial of humanity. Today’s systems rely on something subtler: erasure. Victims disappear not only from legal protections but from public imagination. They are seen only as silhouettes, anonymous workers, nameless migrants, “those people.” The trafficker’s first crime is physical control; the system’s crime is collective indifference.

And so this day, this somber date on the global calendar, demands more from us than ritual acknowledgment. It demands that we admit how much of the modern world is built on the remnants of an old one. The economic hunger that once fueled slave ships has simply recalibrated itself. The logic remains: maximize profit, minimize cost, and rely on the vulnerability of the desperate.

Anyone who believes abolition is a finished project has not been paying attention. Slavery today does not shock because it has been normalized. Human trafficking does not outrage because it has been sanitized. We do not see chains, so we assume no one is bound.

The longest-standing myth about freedom is that it is self-sustaining. It is not. It requires maintenance, vigilance, and, at times, confrontation with the systems we benefit from. If the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery still matters and it does, it is because it reminds us that progress is not linear and justice is not inevitable.

We are still living in the age of abolition. We just haven’t admitted it.