Encouraging Looting of Our Nation by Moronic and Unethical State Kleptocracy

From the same writer:

The researchers sought to assess the death toll from Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza between October 2023 and the end of June 2024, estimating 64,260 deaths due to traumatic injury during this period

The estimate of 64,000 only accounts for people killed directly by weapons or bombing, similar to the count of ~40,000 that the Gaza Health Ministry was maintaining before they lost the ability to maintain the count.

The estimate of 186,000 from the other study accounts for indirect deaths from destruction of medical facilities, lack of clean water, lack of food, etc., which is a much more important number, but is not receiving as much attention for obvious reasons.

Americans when ~20k people are murdered each year (most of which don’t take place on public transit): “The subway is unsafe because there’s too much crime.”

Americans when ~40k people die in car accidents each year: “This is literally the pinnacle of freedom! I feel so safe inside my personal tank!”

Haha that’s got to be a parody, right? There’s no way that’s a real headline…

It’s real

It’s not real :(

@HalfwayPost
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If I had a nickel for every prominent Republican who did something cartoonishly evil relating to pet dogs, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice.

The difference here is that there previously weren’t such restrictions, and she’s not even putting up a fight when Republicans actively worsen conditions relative to the previous status quo. Putting up resistance to any attempts to go backwards should be the bare minimum for anyone who claims to be fighting for the rights of a marginalized group.

So his argument is basically “it’s not bribing people for votes because I never intended to actually pay the bribes”? And it worked?

The cherry on top is that the judge who made the ruling is actually a Democrat.

If this keeps up we might get a Part 3 to this meme.

Robots with small and intricate parts, especially those working in dirty environments, famously never need cleaning or maintenance.

And he says he “wouldn’t even think about” buying again from luxury brands like “Burberry or Louis Vuitton”.

You live in the country that probably manufactured them in the first place. You can buy a knock-off which is just as good for a fraction of the cost.

An autistic Palestinian man was shot by Israeli police at around the same time, and Palestinians held protests for both him and George Floyd.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/01/palestinian-lives-matter-israeli-police-killing-of-autistic-man-draws-us-comparison

Hey, remind me what was going on in 1988 in the propaganda-free bastion of democracy that is the USA? Oh right, it was when the presidential election reached a turning point due to the Revolving Door and Willie Horton ads, which used racist dogwhistles to imply that Dukakis was “soft on crime”. Also, the person who created those ads (Roger Ailes) would later become the CEO of Fox News.

Genuine question: what’s the best way to cut through this kind of talking point?

The best I can come up with is “terms created by marginalized people to describe how people do or do not relate to mainstream society are different from terms imposed by the majority society to coerce marginalized people into a box, and refusing a label in order to obstruct understanding isn’t the same as refusing a label imposed by majority society”. Like, I don’t see any problem to use words used to describe the “normal” identity (cis, hetero, etc) for people that do not express any desire to deviate from the “normal” identity in any way for the sake of improving the understanding of marginalized people. But I’m not sure that’s convincing to someone who doesn’t already agree (perhaps not for the sake of convincing the person you’re arguing with, but the onlooking bystanders).

It’s just such an annoying tactic because the bad faith is usually obvious but it’s hard to clearly formulate why. I guess it basically just boils down to “more allowances should be given to the people on the bottom than the people on the top”, but some of the people on top never stop complaining about that.

I hate when people act as improving the healthcare system is a “complex issue”, when pretty much every developed nation aside from the US manages to do better. It’s not even good from a “fiscally conservative” standpoint; the US has by far the highest healthcare expenditure per capita in terms of government spending alone. Yet even the (relatively) progressive politicians have to talk about additional taxes on the rich to “justify” universal healthcare or else they’ll be treated as “naive fools who think money grows on trees”.

Why do we need to “debate real issues” when it’s plainly obvious that the American healthcare system is objectively worse than even other capitalist nations (the wealthy ones anyways) just from a basic observation? Even high-income PMC types would benefit from not having to deal with insurance and whatever. Though it sucks that in a lot of places that do have universal healthcare, politicians are actively sabotaging it to justify privatization. Comes to show that the “free market” can only “prove” it’s superiority through deception.

Maybe that’s the real dystopia they were trying to show: a world where you can’t drive Ford F-150s

“When you’re looking at a terminal, a traditional freight train is about three miles long, which means you need a place to park three miles of a rolling stock. You need a buffer of about 300 containers. You have trucks going back and forth. It’s a big operation with a lot of real estate and a lot of cost. Our vehicles can interface like a semi truck to go directly where they need to go, load and unload you to get out of the way,” Howard told me.

So just… make a shorter train? You can make trains more flexible without going down to “each car has its own motor”. The only reason why freight trains are so long now is because the companies wanted to cut costs by reducing the number of drivers (even though this comes at a cost to safety and worker well-being). Of course, they need to believe in autonomous rail cars so they can fantasize about automating away their need for workers instead of just employing more people.