Greenleaf

The new theorized death toll numbers (from Lancet) are too much to bear. If those numbers are true, then the genocide of Gaza - in terms of a percent of the population killed and wounded - is right up there with the worst crimes of the 20th century. The Nazi invasion of the USSR, the American genocides in Korea and Vietnam, the bombing of Cambodia, etc. And all of those took place over a matter of years, not months.

Death to America and Death to Israel. Libs in the US had better pray to whatever deity might be out there that this country never gets what it actually deserves. Because Jeremiah Wright was right. We absolutely deserve hell on earth.

Reminder that it just came out that the CIA was promoting anti-vax conspiracies in the global south in order to try and impair the Sinofam vax from being used.

@SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net Nominating little Hassan for COTW next week (Child of the Week).

And also… while it’s possible to be a noted professor academic and a good parent, it’s not easy. Academia demands everything from you. No different from other high profile professions - you usually have to choose between spending time with your family or writing your next paper. I think it’s highly likely both Pete and Kamala’s dads prioritized their careers over their family, with the expected results.

Also, this is even more speculative but I suspect both dads were probably very hands off and “I want them to find their own path and I won’t push Marxism on them.” Nope. You have to be at least somewhat didactic.

Basically, be a good parent and tell your kids how the world really is, and you’re doing about the most you can do.

I’m voting for Claudia de la Cruz, and I’m doing it because voting for a socialist makes me feel good.

I went back and forth on voting for La Riva or Hawkins back in 2020. I ultimately settled on Hawkins purely because it seemed smart - La Riva was on so few ballots, I was hoping the Greens would do well enough to be a spoiler (didn’t happen).

While in the end it really doesn’t matter, afterward I was kinda kicking myself for voting my head and not my heart. I often reflect on my own political journey - and how I’ve been all over the spectrum but I finally feel at home calling myself a communist, and I know this is where I’ll settle in for the rest of my life. Voting PSL - even though again, it doesn’t actually mean anything in the big picture - is like a sort of self-validation of who I am now. So I’ve been planning to vote PSL since then, and I feel very proud to do so.

The British also invented the “concentration camp” during the Boer War.

Another appropriate comparison is the prison system in the southern US post-Reconstruction. Literally what libs think the gulag was. Black men would be arrested on false or trumped up charges all the time, then put into forced labor where death was common. There was one forced labor project I think in Virginia where something like 40% of the prisoners died. Overwork of black convicts to the point of death was pretty common in the southern US at that time.

Death to America.

This is kinda what I was explaining to a lib friend the other day: I was a lot more ambivalent about the SMO before NATO got involved. I didn’t really have a pro/anti position, I just pointed out that this was the natural consequence of the events from 2014 onward.

When Dobbs was on the line not one of the tens of millions of them even tried to kill the scotus.

I also like to point out how afraid libs were when Trump was threatening to nuke the DPRK and possibly start WW3. Not a single lib thought to say “maybe we should strip the power away from a president to be able to do this sort of thing”. But libs would rather die in a nuclear winter than consider fundamentally altering power relationships in government.

As someone familiar with government bureaucracy, both personally and from a historical perspective, I don’t think Project 2025 is all that feasible, at least in the short/medium term.

These government bureaucracies are massive. There is no way you can hire some wine mom from Palm Beach be an environmental scientist at the EPA just because she loves Trump. Government jobs usually require things like interview panels to score people. These jobs have minimum requirements, etc that you can’t actually just bypass. And there so many layers of management. Sure, Trump can staff these agencies with his people at the very top, but that’s something GOP presidents have always done (and Democrats put industry-friendly people in there anyway).

But more importantly, these bureaucracies have their own “immune systems” that prevent attempts to subvert their power. Put it this way: let’s say we got a commie elected to president. The first thing we would want to do is “project 2025” the CIA, right? Just imagine how hard that would actually be, and how effective the CIA would be in largely thwarting this attempt.

Afghanistan should be negative. As the US-backed government collapsed to the Taliban, the US decided to keep like $7 billion of the country’s reserves. US kept most of it but graciously decided to give back a fraction of their own money but only in food, not in cash.

Death to America.

I wish you could short Michelle Obama here. IIRC she has never expressed interest in running for president and by all accounts frankly seemed to be more than done with it all by the time her husband left office. And yet she’s always near the top of the list on these things, I don’t get it.

As of 2019, Abigail Disney's net worth was approximately $120 million.

While that’s still obscenely wealthy, that’s less than what a single Olson Twin is worth. Why is Abigail Disney getting all this media attention for withholding donations when she’s probably all that close to power, certainly not compared to all the many billionaires who donate to the DNC.