ICJ Ruling
Okay, let's get into this.
First of all, I get the frustration at the court not ordering a ceasefire. I was disappointed and frustrated at first too, since a ceasefire was the biggest and most important preliminary measure South Africa was requesting - and of course we just all want this horror to finally end for the people in Gaza. So I get the frustration and disappointment, I really do.
However, I do think this ruling is still a major win for South Africa, Palestine, and international law as a whole and here's why:
The court acknowledged that it has jurisdiction over this case and completely dismissed Israel's request to throw out the case as a whole. It will now determine at the merits stage (that will probably take years) whether Israel is actually commiting genocide.
The court acknowledged that Palestinians are a "distinct national or ethnic group and therefore deserving of protection under the genocide convention". Pull this out next time someone tells you "there's no such thing as Palestinians, they're all just Arabs".
The court acknowledged very unambiguously that "at least some" of Israel's actions being genocidal in nature is "plausible". South Africa has a case, officially. Israel is accused of genocide, in a way the ICJ deems "plausible", officially. This is huge. (And seriously, how freaking satisfying was it to hear all of those genocidal statements by Israeli politicians read out loud and used as justification for this rulling?)
The court might not have ordered a "ceasefire" in those words, but they did order Israel to "immediately end all genocidal acts" (which includes killing and injuring Palestinians) and submit proof that they actually did. How are they going to comply with this ruling without at least severly reducing or changing what they're doing in Gaza?
In fact, this wording might actually be more appropriate for a genocide (vs a war), as author and journalist Ali Abunimah notes on Twitter:
He's completely right. Israel lost today, by overwhelming majority (I mean, 15 to 2? I heard people predict the rulings would be very close, like 9 judges vs 8, but instead we got 15 to 2 (and even 16 to 1 on the humanitarian aid). Holy shit.) The court disimissed almost everything Israel's side of lawyers said, while acknowledging that South Africa's accusations are "plausible".
And this is important especially because of Mr Abunimah's second tweet there^. Because the question is, where do we go from here?
This ruling means that Israel is officially /possibly/ commiting genocide and that should have huge international consequences. The rest of the world now HAS to take these accusations seriously and stop arming and supporting Israel - and if they won't do it on their own, we, the people, have to make them. This is THE moment to rise up all around the world, especially in the countries most supportive of Israel (the US, the UK, Germany): Protest, call your representatives and demand a ceasefire and an end of arms deliveries to Israel.
We now have a legal case to back our demands: If Israel is, according to the ICJ, "plausibly" commiting genocide, then all of our governments are, according to the ICJ, "plausibly" guiltly of aiding in genocide. And we need to hold that over their heads and demand better. We need to do that right now and in huge numbers. Most politicians only care about themselves and saving their skin. We have to make them realize that they could be accused of aiding in genocide.
(As a German, I'm thinking of Germany here in particular: After South Africa's hearing, our government dismissed their case as having "no basis" - how are they going to keep saying that now that the ICJ officially thinks otherwise? Over the last months, people here have been arrested at protests for calling what's happening in Gaza a genocide. How are the police supposed to legally keep doing that now that the ICJ has officially deemed this accusation "plausible"? I used to be scared to use the word "genocide" at protests or write it on my protest signs - not anymore, have fun trying to arrest me for that when the ICJ literally has my back on this one 🖕🏻.)
So yeah - don't be defeatist about this, don't let Israel's narrative that they "won" (they didn't) take over. This might not be everything we wanted, but it's still a good result. Don't let what the court didn't say ("ceasefire"), distract you from the very important things that they did say. Let this be your motivation to get loud and active, especially if you live in any country that supports Israel. Put pressure on your governments to not be complicit in genocide, you now officially have the highest international court on your side.
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beer & apologies
(buddie) (722 words) (7x04 coda)
It’s late, later than any reasonable person would show up on a friend’s doorstep, but Buck’s got this bright, warm feeling in his chest and all he wants to do is apologize so he can share it. For a split second he thinks about knocking, but that feels a little too much like going backwards. Instead, he lets himself in and hangs his key on the hook.
“Eddie,” he calls quietly into the still house.
“Kitchen.” The reply is soft, easy, like Eddie was expecting him.
Buck steps into the room and holds up the beer he brought.
Eddie looks up at him and grins, soft and warm in the glow of the lamplight. “What’s that for?”
“This is ‘sorry for acting like a teenager and spraining your ankle’ beer,” Buck says, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “Seriously, I’m sorry.”
Eddie sighs and pushes an empty chair back from the table with his foot, gesturing for Buck to sit. “I’m sorry too,” he says.
“No, no, you don’t—" Buck starts.
“Yeah, I do,” Eddie interrupts with a wry grin. “You should definitely be sorry-er, though, so I’ll take the beer.”
Buck snorts and sits, setting the six pack on the table between them.
“We didn’t—well, I didn’t…”
“I know,” Buck says. “I was just—”
“I know,” Eddie says softly.
A few, quiet moments pass, and it’s comfortable, exactly what Buck was missing the last couple of days.
“Hey,” Eddie says suddenly, sitting up a little straighter, “at least now I know why you always said no to basketball.” He smiles, loose and just a tiny bit mischievous.
Buck splutters. “What? No! I wasn’t that bad,” he protests.
Eddie lifts his injured ankle and raises an eyebrow.
“Okay, well maybe, but—”
“Uh-uh,” Eddie says, “no buts. You haven many talents, Buck, but basketball isn’t one of them.”
Buck ducks his head and grins. “Maybe I’ll get Tommy to teach me, then I can beat you without playing dirty.” Saying Tommy’s name out loud gives birth to a few giddy butterflies in his stomach.
“You two make up?” Eddie asks.
“Yeah,” Buck says. “He uh—texted me.” The butterflies turn to little rocks.
“Good,” Eddie says, “that’s good.” He grabs a beer and twists the top off. “I really think you guys will get along, if you give him a chance.”
“We, um. Yeah. We probably will.” Buck grabs a beer of his own and stares at the label.
He doesn’t—he didn’t mean to lie. It just kind of… came out. Which, it’s Eddie. Buck knows he could tell him exactly what happened, right now, and it’d be fine. It’d be completely fine because it’s Eddie and he knows Eddie would be cool about it, probably even happy for him! But when he goes to open his mouth it just. Doesn’t.
“How’s—uh. How’s Marisol?” he asks instead, tripping over his words.
Eddie shrugs. “She’s fine, same as always. Apparently Christopher got her to play Fortnite, which, according to him, was a disaster.”
Buck laughs, shaking his head. “That kid,” he says softly.
“That kid,” Eddie agrees. He takes another swig of beer and sits back.
“Hey, wait,” Buck says suddenly. He lurches forward and snags the bottle out of Eddie’s hand. “You can’t have this, you’re on pain killers.”
“It’s my apology beer!” Eddie protests.
“Nope, two sips is plenty. I can’t hurt your ankle and your liver on the same day.”
“It’s after midnight, it’s tomorrow,” Eddie pouts. “Give it.” He makes a halfhearted attempt to grab it back, but Buck holds the beer aloft.
“Nuh-uh, absolutely not,” Buck says. “You can drink your apology beer this weekend.”
“My apology beer is going to be flat and stale,” Eddie replies, unimpressed.
Buck rolls his eyes. “I’ll buy you a new apology beer, alright?”
“Promises, promises.”
“I will!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Eddie laughs. “You better. Want to bring it over on Saturday? We can watch the game.”
Buck’s grin falters a little bit, even as that warm feeling bubbles up in his chest all over again. “I uh- can’t, sorry.”
“What, you got a hot date or something?” Eddie asks with a laugh.
Buck takes a long swallow from the beer he stole from Eddie. “Yeah, something,” he says with a hollow laugh.
He feels like a liar.
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I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.
I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.
The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...
Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.
I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.
And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?
It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.
To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.
In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.
Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.
So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.
What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.
Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?
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i'm still stuck on the purgatories so here's a list of purgatory 2 moments simply off the top of my head that deserve to be remembered:
aimsey ducking all of axolotl team alone in a cave with literally half a heart
goose gang fucking descending on the raccoon base and absolutely wrecking shop
ethan crankgameplays clutching up for team panda during the capture the flag game by being the only one hanging out in the center and periodically checking the chests, earning them a shitton of flags and clutching multiple rounds
crow team's egg taking 0 damage
pac doxxing goose gang's egg in the last second
shelby shubble as the last member of her team online writing a letter to aimsey and sharing the world's most devastating ten minutes before her team was eliminated with one of the eye creatures (coco? i forgot lol)
badboyhalo absolutely fucking DEMOLISHING the battleship event on like 2 hours of sleep and a dream
wuant(?) stealing a tv from the battleship event and then playing portuguese ice age on it for the crows lmfao
tubbo djing for his team while waiting for the time for a goose gambit
theguill CRASHING THROUGH THE FUCKING CEILING of the raccoon team's hidey hole like the fucking kool aid man in a last effort to save his team and 4v1 or 5v1 ing team raccoon; he lost but that was such an epic fucking moment
theguill and etoiles pvping and each hyping the other's skills the entire time
seapeekay escaping cellbit and baghera and then stealing their boats and rocketing past to tease them about it; that shit was iconic
kenny going mad with power collecting sand on literally day 1
the english speaking squirrels taking actual physical notes on portuguese phrases (i think)
lgbtiba
i may add more this is an off the top of my head list but like got DAMN i like these events :D i like them a lot
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house is unapologetically needy; he demands things of people, and will simply leave if he doesn't get them. everybody knows this, sure. but so many neglect to mention that wilson is just the equally screwed up inverse of this. he needs to be needed - he demands to be needed, just as much as house demands to be needy. and, just like house, he is willing to up and leave if he doesn't get to be needed in the way he craves
it's like wilson believes he will cease to exist if he is no longer needed. here's a man who was raised to.. be things for other people, never for himself. and the one time he puts himself first, back in med school, his brother goes off the rails, rarely seen again. he does not know how to exist for himself, and so he believes he simply will not exist if no one needs him. and so, he desires to be useful above all else. it's the only way he survives. he became an oncologist to always be needed, to always have something to give
in greek mythology, there is the idea that gods will simply fade into the background if people stop worshipping them, needing them. and this can be applied to wilson's mentality. he believes that he has no purpose without being useful to others, without serving others. sure, his ex wives needed him. but as they grew up and apart, this became less and less, so he left them first, before they could admit what he feared most - that he wasn't necessary anymore
and who always needs him ? who is demanding, domineering ? who is so needy that his well of want will never run out ? house. this is simply why they work so well. they crave each other's neediness and thrive off of it. universal donor & universal recipient, etc
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