If you would report an undocumented immigrant to ICE you would have reported me to the Nazis and I don’t fucking trust you
A note:
I live in a state where you “have to” report anyone you suspect of being undocumented (that wonderful hellhole of Arizona). Now in practice this law has fallen far short, thank goodness. But if you live in such a place and they start enforcing it, here is how you get around it:
Assume everyone who doesn’t speak English is visiting.
Never ask about their job, because if they tell you they work here then you know they’re not visiting. You see them a lot for several weeks or months? Hm. Someone in the family must be ill. That’s terribly tough. They always dress in old, ratty laborers’ clothes? I feel you, my dude, I can’t afford new clothes either, and my dad has the fashion sense of an aardvark, so sometimes it’s not even about “affording” them. They say they’ve been here for years? You must have misunderstood. Spanish isn’t your first language, after all. First and last name? It never came up, or you don’t recall–you meet a lot of people.
And then, if you’re asked: no, you haven’t seen anyone residing illegally in the United States. Just people visiting.
Very good very important addition
Essentially, this is the civil society version of a work-to-rule strike.
Don’t do more than is expressly asked of you, and do what you are asked with such an intense attention to protocol that not asking you at all becomes more effective than even bothering.
In this case:
“Have you seen an illegal immigrant?”
“Could you describe an illegal immigrant, officer?”
*officer describes a person who is in the country without appropriate paperwork, or who has crossed the border illegally*
“No, sir, I haven’t seen any illegal immigrant.”
And this is correct. You have NOT seen an illegal immigrant, because you have no way of knowing if Jose Fulano is here legally or not. And since you can’t see his paperwork (or lack thereof), and did not personally see him cross the border illegally, you are only answering precisely the question asked.
I’m not American, and I have like, three followers, but this is important.
So, I’m a lawyer, who deals with immigration though does not specialize in it. But here’s the thing(s):
1) Even someone who’s working could be here on a migrant (or other sort of) visa (hey, there are a few thousand per year, and *someone*’s got to get them, right?) or could be waiting for their case to resolve in immigration court, after having come to America to join a born or naturalized American family member.
2) Even people who are working improperly could have come into the country legally – and just overstayed their visa or be violating the conditions of their visa, and you have no idea what the niggly little regulations that govern that might be.
3) If a law enforcement officer asks you about a neighbor/friend/etc., take this moment to remind them that, unlike them, you cannot ask a random person off the street for their ID and be entitled to a response.
4) Even if someone has told you that they are undocumented, you still don’t know, do you? Humans lie all the time. How could you know for sure? You can’t, because they can’t prove that they have a lack of papers. Just because you haven’t seen papers doesn’t mean they don’t exist!
5) Don’t ever talk to cops in general. Why are you talking to a cop? Stop that, as soon as it is safe and feasible.
connor storrie going on a talk show where the host calls odesa, texas, a namesake of an ukrainian city that’s getting bombed by russia, the “most russian part of texas” and him agreeing with a huge smile is fucking vile. throw the whole show out. throw the cast out too
A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”
Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet).
OH NO POOR BABY DOES SOMEONE FEEL UNSAFE IN THEIR OWN HOME AND NEIGHBORHOODS? OH NO HOW SAD IMAGINE DOING THAT TO MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AND THEN HAVING IT HAPPEN TO YOU??? SO SAD SO SAD I AM SURE VIRGIN MARY STATURES ARE CRYING TEARS OF BLOOD OVER IT
Given America’s historical success rate in wars of occupation, it is pretty baffling that Trump has decided to convert all of America’s domestic problems into wars of occupation.
It’s not Trump making these decisions, it’s Stephen Miller.
Trump is a child. He is incapable of deciding whether he wants a Quarter Pounder with Cheese or Filet O-Fish, much less making any real decisions like which American city to invade next. Miller has dictated most of the policies we’ve seen enacted.
Nothing like browsing hurt/comfort on ao3 to really drive home that no one fucking knows how hypothermia works. Jesus guys. Get it together. Don’t make me do a psa. It’ll be embarrassing for everyone.
If you’re getting the bulk of your emergency preparedness from archive of our own or heaven forbid Tumblr dot com on the world wide web, the problem is several steps upstream. I can’t help you much with that one. But I can make a helpful critique on writing effective whump because that’s what we’re here for! Should hypothermia be your plot agent of choice you should recognize that the true horror and tragedy is that you have more time than you think you do and all your mistakes are easily fixable but you can’t do a damn thing about them.
Give your character with agency and control issues hypothermia. They will have nightmares about the slow paralysis and lethargy of cold until the day they die. The physical and mental symptoms creep in by degrees that you can easily monitor and recognize but are powerless to stop. The dissolution of initiative and the loss of rationality is terrifying when it happens and it’s actually worse after warming up because you can remember being dead certain that striping out of your clothes in the snow was the right thing to do.
The psychology of the situation is as close as reality can get to the frog boiling experiment, where everything slowly gets worse and worse and the only thing that could stop it is getting out of the scenario and since that’s an impossibility there’s nothing that can solve anything. Bash your whumpee with utter hopelessness while giving them nerve damage, buy one get one style.
If you must get nitpickety about the physics and medical details, hypothermia is when the human body can not maintain internal temperature warmer than the surrounding environment. Homeostasis is maintained by - wait no, too many big words. Drink water, eat food, body needs to keep the guts warm. Food and water are the fuel to keep the guts warm. Guts are 90(ish) degrees, air is usually cooler than that and you can go hypothermic in weather as warm as 60 if you haven’t been drinking or eating. The water drinking part is more important than the eating part. Hypothermia at 60 is not gonna be the same as hypothermia in below freezing weather. The nerve damage part is from the equivalent of freezer burn happening in living flesh, so that won’t happen if the ambient air temp is above freezing, niether will the frostbite or gangrene. You also dont need to be hypothermic for frostbite to occur on skin and extremities since your core can be perfectly toasty while your toes freeze solid, but it does tend to happen together.
As for your rescuer/caretaker/comfortgiver. This shit is fucking terrifying. The whole cuddle for warmth thing can be actively dangerous since you are also a human being with guts that need to stay warm and a finite amount of body heat to donate. If you’re still out in the cold, cuddling with a person sized ice pack is a good way to end up with 2 person sized ice packs. Even if you are in a safe place to get them warm, ouch, frostbite hurts and it only starts hurting when you warm up enough to not be numb, so you can save your person and then forcibly subject them to creeping searing pain that you cannot soothe.
Not to mention the heart attacks. A rush of cold blood from the extremities back to the heart can be enough to cause the cardiac muscle to go wtf and freak out. (Super scientific terminology right there for ya) What would cause a sudden rush of cold blood like that? A bruise. Even a little one. Your patient also happens to be numb, disoriented, and clumsy at the moment. Good luck. Pray for decent baseline cardiac health.
So here’s the thing. I dont actually care if the whump is accurate. I want it to be interesting. Go sort through your blorbos for the one who would have the worst time in the above situations. Fly my scarabs. I want those characters tired and chilled, wet and weather beaten. Get after it. On to thermodynamically improbable scenarios we go!
From an allegorical standpoint, being numb means it is really easy to hurt yourself. Go get a hold of your repression princess who shrugs everything off because they’re fine guys and have them burn the shit out of their hands trying to warm up. Numb fingers and fire is not a great combo. Numb fingers and boiling water is also not great. All sorts of juicy parallels to be drawn.
Fun tidbit about frostbite specifically, when you freeze a body part the water in that body part expands into nasty little ice crystals that tear up the cell walls and organ tissues. That’s where the damage comes from. Once its frozen though, its not as if the ice crystals can do anything else, but if things thaw and refreeze without medical attention or time to heal in between, that’s how you lose fingers. The water refreezes into crystals and then there are more more sharp edges on the inside of cells and tissues. Meat turns to goo, meat that is goo doesn’t do anything but rot and that’s gangrene. Point being, if you’re going to warm someone up, make sure you can keep them warm. This is where you put fun metaphors about backsliding and relapses.
Like most situations, everything can be made worse by being drunk. Alcohol acts as a vasodialator and opens up all the capillaries which will bleed heat. Do not get drunk and take a nap in a snowberm, you only feel sweaty and warm, you ain’t. Legions of homeless alcoholics have discovered this the hard way.
As for the bit about having more time than you think you do, hypothermia and associated motor skill loss can definitely creep up on you if you aren’t familiar with the progression, but it is a progressive problem. Your hands will get stiff and the way you measure how cold you’re getting is to touch your thumb to your fingers. Thumb to pinky will be the first to go and as you lose range of motion in your hands it will progress to ring finger. When you can’t make your thumb meet your index finger that’s the sign that you need to drop whatever you’re doing and go get warm because if it gets much worse you won’t be able to use your hands. Not having use of your hands make the whole ‘getting out of the cold and getting warm’ bit that much harder.
Thinking that stripping is a good idea is probably the last idea you will ever have, because that’s the point where your body gives up on conserving heat and it all gets dumped back into the extremities. Or at least we think that’s what happens, people don’t survive that shit often enough for us to actually check.
I can’t lie. I saw your reblog crop up in my notes, and it only offered up the first half of your first sentence, so my brain immediately defaulted to sex work, and I was very confused for a minute.
ALT
