Or rich people can be taxed, that’s always an option. Or they can ignore oil lobbies and pump money into renewables to save money on gas imports. There are plenty of ways for a country like France to raise money when they want to do something.

True, but notably it took a revolution against Gaddafi to give the bandits of Euro-American imperialism the pretense they needed to act. It doesn’t seem to me like there’s such a single point of failure here. It also helps that Western control in Africa is pretty spotty (see: the Coup Belt) so we can expect a lack of bases to pull that kind of bullshit from to be relevant.

Omg I’m so surprised I can’t believe this is happening.

That’s the thing: There are no stats showing that a candidate being a woman is a significant disadvantage in American elections. It feels like it should be, but there’s just zero evidence showing it is. It doesn’t even show up in post-election polling. Meanwhile I couldn’t more recent data but a significant number of Americans across the political spectrum does not like Muslims.

Edit: Found more recent data. In any case I think the point makes itself; if we’re choosing by whose demographic palatable to the American electorate (which is probably not the best method) then it’s AOC all the way.

I mean, the dude in charge. There’s no reason to expect the people not in charge to do anything different once they’re in charge, is the point. If you want that not to be the case, you’ll have to do something other than hope.

I mean, this is a new low for the FBI but it’s not that much lower than their last low.

Oh my God I’m going to have to listen to this aren’t I?

Edit: Wait it’s actually not bad at all. From a long career of listening to Arabglish, that’s decently close to what a native Arabic speaker that speaks decent English (but not fluent) will sound like. His stresses and consonants are too good, and the bad consonant clusters aren’t consistent enough, but say what you want about the man, he tried.

I don’t think there’s a significant difference between El Sayed and AOC on a policy basis. If I had to say something El Sayed would probably be the more principled anti-Zionist, and he doesn’t call himself a scary socialist, but for the most part I don’t think the median Dem voter cares about policy positions on that level. I’d go for AOC just not to risk a Dem seat tbh.

Luckily no organization is going to be able to just name a candidate.

Whoever it eventually is, will have to win a full 50 state primary. And even if the DSA is outspokenly against her (or any other progressive) it just won’t fucking matter.

Uh that’s not how that works. Any candidate needs people to organize and get out the vote for them, and for a leftwing candidate those tend to disproportionately come from the hard left. This means that for someone like AOC, the DSA might not be essential but it’s really nice to have.

Actually the woman thing is very much unsubstantiated. Were there any exit polls pointing to gender being a significant factor? Given that even MAGAts can elect women into Congress every now and then, I think even the misogynists of America will just deal with it. If anything a Muslim president would be an even bigger risk.

Fetch quests

Why do you think pregnant women have a habit of randomly wanting very specific things?

☕️ women.

Bruh TIL that Greek mahshi (the Middle Eastern equivalent of this) is a thing.

That’s probably what they hope to do, but as Trump and co. have shown, you can’t quite put that genie back in the bottle that easily. They’ll definitely be looking for an opportunity to sweep it under the rug though.

It’s even better than you think. Organic and semi-organic solar panels are improving fast, so even disposing of the toxic metals involved in their manufacturing is likely to become a problem of the past.

Hey, if you know someone who was working class between like 1900 and 1933 they might have something useful to say.

As the late David Graeber tells us, the consumerism is a systemic issue; people buy pointless shit because their jobs are so pointless and soul-draining (he calls this spiritual violence) that the only thing they have the energy to do outside of work is buy dumb shit. Relevant excerpt:

In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanisms wrong. We’re not working harder because we’re spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving one another sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it—“a life,” and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford.

The idea that America being untrustworthy is a Trump thing is the most first world thing ever. Like, y’all Iraq is right there.