Not once did I see the descriptor “Hamas run.” It’s about goddamn time Western media started moving away from that to cast aspersions on the truthfulness of Gazan government statements.
Also,
A UN report this week said that nearly 70% of the people killed in the war in Gaza have been women and children.
They’ll just make a whole lot of stuff illegal, selectively enforce those laws, and BOOM increase the prison slave population. Hell, the South did it after the Civil War to get it’s slave labor back, how hard would it be to do nationwide now.
Not quite. From what I’ve been able to gather, housing in the postwar era was made fast and cheap to ensure everyone could have a place in the immediate aftermath of the devastation. Then, in the sixties, they came up with better building standards, more regulations, and evaluated the lifespan of typical housing. I don’t remember the exact number, but they determined a conservative lifespan to be like 20-30 years. With this in mind, they started to constantly update building codes to make new construction safer and more resilient to natural disasters. So, what would end up happening is old homes stay cheap because not many people want to buy at the end of its life, and it’s less expensive to build new to modern standards than rehabbing an old home. Side note: recently the old estimated lifespan was re-evaluated and they determined that housing lasts, again I don’t remember the exact number, closer to 50 years.
Now, while all this is happening they have a different relationship to zoning than, say, America. What’s in America? It’s mostly single use zoning. They have a lot more mixed use zoning that allows for building housing where it would be illegal in America like commercial zones or light industrial zones. Side note: America used to build like that too until suburbs were invented and pushed as THE solution to housing people in our postwar era. Think of the older parts of towns with stores on the ground level and housing being 1-4 floors above them. With this freedom to build, they have built way more housing than is actually needed and in places people want to live.
The last point, which was already mentioned above, is that they don’t view housing as an investment. It’s a place where you raise your family, you store your belongings, and sleep. You don’t buy a home with the idea of selling it to make a ton of money in a few years or even decades. With that, there’s no incentive to buy up housing and leave it sitting empty for the right time to maximize the investment. It’s sort of like we view cars. Cars don’t typically increase in value, and the ones that do it’s because they’re rare, beautiful, or historic. MFers are out here trying to sell the housing equivalent of an '80s Ford Fiesta at 2024 fully loaded Toyota Camry or even Mercedes S Class prices.
Summary: Housing has a shorter lifespan, can be built almost anywhere through more mixed zoning, and it isn’t an investment, it’s just a place to live.
Tally Gotliv, a Likud MP, told MEE: “We need to occupy the complete land of Israel. There are no innocent people in Gaza. Everybody who has refused to leave the north is a collaborator.”
Monday’s event took place against the backdrop of an escalating military assault on northern Gaza where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remained trapped and subjected to daily air strikes.
The assault came amid reports from Israel that the military has started to implement a strategy known as “the Generals’ Plan” which called for the ethnic cleansing of the north of the territory, and condemnation by aid groups who warned last week that northern Gaza is being “erased”.
This is their plan. They’re doing it right now. I can’t imagine how folks will deny this, I guess they’ll move onto justify.
I think sentiment is changing. Recently I’m noticing more US mainstream media using language like
Since Israel launched its devastating retaliation for the Hamas-led attack just over a year ago
It’s a small thing, it’s better than the softer language they would normally use. But, damn, it’s not enough.
How naive of me to think “That can’t be a real article. Surely they wouldn’t publish themselves saying they crushed living and dead people by the hundreds with an armored bulldozer. They must know how abhorrent, insane, and shocking that sounds. Right?”
No. Of course the worst excesses of violence which had never crossed my mind are being done by the IDF. I’m… I have no words.
This isn’t exactly what the previous comment was talking about, but it’s similar. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigration-law-workers and there’s something similar going on Florida too https://www.npr.org/2024/04/26/1242236604/florida-economy-immigration-businesses-workers-undocumented
These are my go-to articles anytime the subject of undocumented workers comes up. Personally, I think we would go back to the old model. If I remember correctly, the 1930s was when immigration started to be severely restricted; but, before that, temporary workers would come up for a season of employment and then go back home. All of it was done legally. It wasn’t until immigration restrictions were enacted that there was an incentive to stay and move their families into the US.
This is exactly what I’ve been thinking lately. And on top of already existing laws, make new ones that criminalize currently normal things. Hell, the South enacted new laws after slavery ended and only applied them against Black Americans. Why stop there, why not increase penalties for certain crimes from misdemeanors to felonies and make 3 felony convictions mean a life sentence?
The only part I disagree with is the for profit prisons part. 8% of prisoners are in private prisons which is 8% too many, but 92% are in publicly funded and operated prisons. And those publicly operated prisons sell the services of their trapped slave labor for so many more things than stamping license plates or road work. Not only do they fight fires and clean up after natural disasters, they also make kit (armor, helmets) for the armed forces, they pick crops, they manufacture white goods (washing machines, refrigerators)(I can’t find a link specifically mentioning appliances and I’ll update this it I find one), and so much more. Shoot, some cities’ budgets would be blown up if not for the availability of publicly held prison slaves.
Oh hey, we’ve played this game before. And it went as poorly as informed people expected. More than once, if you can believe it.
I believe, based on absolutely nothing, that if mass deportations happen, then there’ll be a change in the farming labor force. No one will do the work at current wages and the owners will resist raising wages. The vacuum will be filled by prison slaves because they don’t get a choice and they get paid pennies per hour.
I don’t know what the restrictions are on using enslaved prisoners, but if there are any, they’ll be removed and the process to acquire them streamlined. That alongside enacting draconian laws to imprison and enslave even more people should be enough to offset the loss of migrant labor. I hope I’m wrong.
That was- I cannot convey just how insane that was using spoken language. I think I’d need to smash a watermelon, aim a sandblaster filled with crushed seashells and desiccated termites at it, start blasting and let my intuition do its thing until something resembling art was produced. Possibly while doing interpretive dance and making primal guttural grunting noises. That would get me pretty darn close to properly communicate my thoughts on what I saw. Thank you.
I do wonder, though, what they’d do when
crops are left rotting in fields and houses and buildings aren’t rebuilt after disasters because all undocumented immigrants have been reported;
after LGBT+ folks hide themselves and “fit in” for safety like it’s the 1950s;
when there are masses of unemployed young people born after abortion and contraception are outlawed living in a nation unequipped to handle them;
after the education and environmental protection systems cease to exist and the country falls behind in every metric of a developed nation from an absence of knowledge pools and poison in everything.
What will they do after creating an environment that fosters stability, innovation, and a thriving society like we saw in the mid-2010’s Middle East. It sure sounds like a great and prosperous future, doesn’t it. Right?..
Here’s a list of states that have effectively banned adult films websites by requiring sites to verify a user’s age:
The states are:
While the specifics vary between states, in general the new laws mean users are required to provide a pornographic website with a copy of their ID to obtain access or by sending it to a third party.
Project 2025 and “adult conent”
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology … is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
What does this mean? Well it seems to mean that the far right want to define a book that features a same-sex couple as illegal pornography and throw the author of the book and any distributors of the book in prison. It seems to mean that a book talking about sexual violence could be classified as porn and banned. It seems to mean that talking about the existence of trans people would be “porn” and criminalized. In short: anything that goes against normative gender roles and hierarchies, or interrogates those hierarchies, could be considered obscene and criminalized.
These are the kinds of laws they have in theocracies. These were the kinds of laws they had in the Soviet Union. This is where they want to take us. And that is where we will go if we let them.
There’s a neat post I came across some time ago showing how few votes can still win the electoral college.
Turns out, though unlikely, it is possible to win the election with less than 25% of votes through the magic of the electoral college and disproportionate representation.
Here’s a fun article about how different people are treated differently for the same crime. You gotta love the good ol’ U.S. of A.
Especially since it’s legal in California. Like, c’mon guys, what the hell are y’all doin’?! What’s Michael Jordan saying “Just stop it” when you need him.
Right?! And we can’t be sure he even smelled the weed he claimed to smell. The other things could be verified by being photographed or requesting documents. But the marijuana smell, the thing that probably made the warrant approvable at all, can never be verified. I wouldn’t be surprised if he made it up; hell, they do it during traffic stops so why not for a search warrant.
Right! I use silicone spatulas because I like the slight bit of flop it has, but there are options besides pan scratching metal and really crappy, pan saving plastic spatulas.
Maybe not all of them were ready for violence, but a lot of them were prepared. They didn’t forget to bring guns, many had guns on them inside the Capitol building.. There were people with zip-tie handcuffs.. They were a hair’s breadth away from politicians who were their targets of ire, who they believed were stealing their country, when Ashli Babbitt breached the last barrier and reached the last line of defense before being shot. Behind Babbitt was a hallway/staircase full of insurrectionists.
Few started the day with a desire to get into the Capitol. Many were swept up in the moment by following far right extremist groups who were executing a plan to get in. Though we know how far they went following those extremists, we’ll never know how much farther they would have gone had those same extremists managed to reach politicians. Thank goodness they were stopped otherwise this may be a very different country.
Specifically about veterans’ healthcare: Veterans surveyed supported Trump 61% to 37% Harris with 2% undecided. And it’s not like the plan to screw up VA benefits was hidden, it was there in Project 2025.