Aug 16, 2024

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Author Stephen King has a new viral tweet featuring a picture of himself wearing a Kamala Harris t-shirt modeled after an Obama campaign sticker captioned with the words “I’M SPEAKING” — a phrase with which she drew headlines and severe public outcry last week by using it to shut down anti-genocide protesters at a campaign rally in Detroit.

That’s right: they’re using her condescending shutdown of pro-Palestine demonstrators as a fun girlboss campaign slogan now.

God damn it I hate Democrats so fucking much.

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It’s actually kind of obnoxious that Gaza gets framed as a “political” issue at all. If you turned into an alleyway and saw a man dismembering a child, would your reaction to what you were witnessing be “political”? We’re all witnessing raw video footage of horrific atrocities every day; our reaction to this is not comparable to our opinions about prison reform or fiscal policy.

This idea that professors shouldn’t discuss “politics” in class with regard to an active genocide, or that a pianist deserves to have his concert canceled because he expressed “political views” by dedicating a piece to the journalists who’ve been killed in Gaza, or that we shouldn’t bring up Gaza in polite company because it’s talking about “politics” — these are symptoms of a civilization that has gone stark, raving mad.

Our visceral response to what we are witnessing is no more “political” than our reaction to someone stomping on puppies would be “political”. This isn’t one of those “oh yeah well you have your opinion and I have mine and that’s cool” things. Human beings are being butchered by the thousands in full view of the whole world. You don’t get to run cover for this by filing it away under the label of political opinion.

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Saying Iran and Hezbollah should not retaliate when Israel goes on an assassination spree in the capital cities of their countries is exactly the same as telling the world that Israel gets to kill whoever they want whenever they want with no consequences.

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Israeli officials are reportedly showing more and more support for a war with Hezbollah, largely because support from the US and its allies has proved so unwaveringly reliable no matter what Israel does over the past year.

Washington’s unconditional support for Israel keeps making the middle east a more and more dangerous and deadly place. They say they’re working to bring “peace and stability” while demonstrably having the exact opposite effect in every possible way.

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Perhaps the strongest evidence that the US empire is not run by rational actors is the way all facts show that a war with China would be completely unwinnable and would destroy the economy and the ecosystem — and yet all facts also show they’re preparing to wage this war anyway.

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The only way to believe Democrats are significantly better than Republicans or vice-versa is to both (A) be unable to distinguish actions from words and (B) to completely ignore foreign policy.

(A) means you have to look solely at your preferred party’s platform while ignoring the actions they actually take, which are not drastically different from the actions the other party takes relative to the 99.99% of policies and systems they leave in place from administration to administration.

(B) means you have to pay zero attention to all the violence, tyranny and abuse the US government inflicts upon populations around the world, of which there is no meaningful difference between parties at all. The overwhelming majority of American violence, tyranny and abuse is directed not at Americans but at people outside the United States, so by excluding this from your analysis you are excluding almost all of the evils of your preferred party when claiming it is morally superior to the other.

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US foreign policy is much, much more consequential, destructive and deadly than US domestic policy. It’s not a “single issue”, it’s almost all of the issues.

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