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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Counterpoint, I grew up in a smallish town in Idaho and was still absolutely surrounded by Democrats. State wide, only sixty percent of the voting age population actually turned out, and of those one out of every three people voted against Trump.

    Hell, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in some countries and again, this is fucking Idaho.

    This means that if you talk to an a Idahoan at random, there is a more than fifty percent chance they either largely already agree with you, or they are largely insulated from and not paying attention to politics and thusly susceptible to being swayed with the right approach and concrete examples of what Trumps doing to fuck them and their friends over specifically.

    Left wing ideas and policy are still far more popular among the general public, which is why Republicans have to lie about them constantly.

    Look for your local anarchist bookstore, look at what your counties Democrats actually organized, especially things like local pride events, show up, and network/make friends.

    As is fun to note, there are more Democrats living in Texas than New York state, so the idea you should just give up on finding any around you because you live in a red state instead of one where the numbers are reversed is honestly rather absurd.


  • Sonori@beehaw.orgtoMemes@lemmy.ml"Stalin starved his population!”
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    10 months ago

    Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…






  • I mean Saudi Arabia also does all those things, most of them far better than Israel ever could due to geography, and at a far lower cost. If Isreal snapped out of existence tomorrow, between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Greece European and North American power projection in the Middle East and North Africa remains almost entirely unchanged.

    Honestly the military benefits of supporting Isreal while real are definitely not as important as the domestic political benefits to the US, which is to say that the conservatives like Isreal because it provides a nice place to deport all the Jews to while also maintaining precedent for an enthnostate with race based citizenship, and the Democrats like it because they get a lot of gifts, friends, and in their minds potential voters, all for doing exactly what the conservatives want them to do.




  • Functionally, probably? Given most states are sovereign instead of being divided up into zones by security checkpoints managed by a foreign power and which requires citizenship in said foreign power to cross. Between how much influence Isreal has in the government of the West Bank archipelago and the requirement that Palestinians possess a lower tier of Israeli citizenship in order to move from town to town, I don’t think a strong case can be made that the Isrealis have allowed the Palestinians have sovereignty over their own territory.

    As such the Palestinian people of the West Bank have been and unfortunately practically remain part of the Israeli state, albeit a horribly discriminated and abused part of it with very good reason to splinter off into their own state. If Isreal had actually followed the UN mandate in the first place there might be a stronger argument that the West Bank and Gaza have always had a sovereign Palestinian government, but they functionally annexed them instead, and as such the West Bank and Gaza are now hopefully splintering off from the government they have been largely barred from participating in on racial grounds.


  • You mean free trade policies might result in foreign companies coming in and outcompeting local ones here instead of just allowing our companies to go into, take over, and outcompete their ones? How could this happen? Who could have possibly predicted this turn of events? How could anyone else’s companies come in and do unto us exactly what we’ve been doing to them for the last half century?

    Why, next your going to tell me that in a free market a company with lower labor costs that is willing to slash profit margins might actually gain market share over a collection of companies that collectively decided not to compete with each other on margins./s


  • Cracking down on “illegal” immigration, exclusively targets legal immigrants showing for appointments at government offices, sounds about Right.

    Surely randomly deporting legal immigrants can only going to lead to higher illegal imagination as people decide to not present themselves at the border in favor of banking on the shear impossibility of effectively survaling the entire country. But I imagine that is kind of the point, we need to manufacture a illegal imagination crisis but all we have is legal asylum seekers, so we better do something about that and bet that our electorate is too dumb to understand.





  • It’s really strange how the stats own budget analysis blames a week stock market and tax income on said market for the drop as compared to their previous buget surplus but the narrative is that we need to bend over backwards for the poor billionaires.

    I believe the top comment over there noted how at most wealthy Californian’s leaving could have contributed 1.4 billion of the 68 billion shortfall, so I’m as skeptical as every other time this argument comes up that tax is a major deciding factor on where you live and not things like jobs, geography, climate, weather, public services, safety, friends/family, house prices, cost of living, etc…

    As a neat aside, an economic studiy found that at a national level the US could get up to a ninety percent tax rate on the super rich before enough of them would actually renounce their citizenship to get out of taxes to offset the increased income. Admittedly US citizenship is very desirable compared to most others, especially for the supper rich, but it gives some perspective on how high you actually have to go to make a difference.

    It’s also worth noting that the current US tax rates are very low compared to both many other nations, and indeed things like corbate income is a third of its historical level during the 50s and 60s, and less than half of that of Canada. For instance 2017 corporate tax cuts alone are responsible for an estimated four hundred billion a year in additional national dept, have been found to have no statistical effect on market growth distinguishable from random noise, but arn’t likely to be fully removed anytime soon for some reason.

    It is perhaps unsurprising that the rise of absurdly low taxes on high income earners nationally has been an increase in both public dept and taxes on low and medium income earners, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.