Aaron Bady
@zunguzungu
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A packaged bundle of content, services, and a polar vortex of meat blood full of bees. Writer and editor. zunguzungu on apps https://t.co/Rki2TwpNU7
Joined June 2009
I wish the discourse on why America got steamrolled by this virus was a little less "people going out and having fun" and a little more "this country has no paid sick leave, our health care is a disaster, and the GOP isn't the only party prioritizing the economy".
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It's all very confusing I agree but my best guess as to who bombed the hospital in Gaza would be that it might be the people who have been bombing Gaza.
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the "controlled demolition" of a legislative building really makes a lot of long term plans very very clear.
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The basic (colonial) double standard of the Israel Palestine "conflict" is that any Palestinian violence justifies any Israeli violence, but no Israeli violence ever justifies any Palestinian violence, and once you see it, you'll never stop seeing it.
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That NY Times essay about how ectopic pregnancies are real babies is so unbelievably misguided that I don't even understand how to process it.
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The way the right has turned "homeless person" into a thing you are supposed to be afraid of, synonymous with crime--rather than feeling empathy for a human being who we have so comprehensively failed, as a society--is bad.
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I know everyone is numb by now, but the fact that Israel is just openly destroying the West Bank now too is staggering.
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as a non-Jew, for whom the stakes are different, I have to say: the antizionist Jews leading the charge and putting their bodies and lives on the line are some of the most principled, bravest people and I admire them so much, this shit is not easy at all.
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A lot of times, when people say "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," they mean that Palestinians will be free of colonial violence in their geographically-defined, historic homeland, and the way you can tell they mean that is by considering what words mean.
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one of the great propagandist successes is absolutely disappearing how many times Palestinians have tried to protest "the right way" and how it always goes the same way.
Just a reminder that in 2018, Palestinians in Gaza mounted the Great March of Return to show the world their plight. Day after day, they walked, unarmed, to Israel's military fences around Gaza. Israel shot 8,000 with live ammunition, killed 220 Palestinians. 36,143 total injured.
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not to be slavoj zizek but the thing here is that the peach is not the object of desire, the object of desire is the husband who can simply eat the peach (she is trapped in the need to be the martyr, thus cannot eat fruit).
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would love a clarification from Fetterman on whether he believes "stay on your own continent" is a general rule, or whether it specifically applies to people from specific continents, and if so, perhaps he could elaborate on that.
John Fetterman clarifies his comments that South Africa “ought to sit this one out.”. The North American senator who has supported sending Israel more aid says that South Africa should instead focus on the African continent.
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if only there was a worked out theoretical frame of analysis for understanding this process of removing the indigenous people so as to clear space for desired settlers.
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I think a lot of people who are banking on this being the usual routine massacre of Palestinians, after which everything goes back to the quietly horrific normal, are so accustomed to turning their brains off when the subject comes up that they're wildly misreading the situation.
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At the end of Return of the King and at the end of The Avengers, killing the leader magically makes the soldiers all stop fighting. This is a deeply held folk belief of imperial powers!.
not many people know this but if you kill the leadership, historically speaking, the guerilla group all give up and stop fighting if you kill the guys at the top. amazed this isn’t more widely known.
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Something about how a lot of the "services" that are far too essential to be allowed to stop right now are also officially "unskilled labor" and massively undercompensated relative to whatever shit people with college educations do from home now.
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It's amazing to see "let's share the land. I want to be neighbors" morph into "I need a militarized border between me and you immediately because you are ethnically different and I hate that" so seamlessly
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When you have so many people arguing that an unknown number of dead bodies are a necessary price to pay to ensure the health of the economy they fetishize, calling those people a "death cult" isn't hyperbole or exaggeration, it's literally the most adequate term to describe them.
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When it comes to settler colonialism, a lot of folks want the "so you want to expel every white person from the continent?!" conversation instead of a "most Western land is literally owned by the federal government, what if they just gave it back to the tribes" conversation
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If your timeline doesn't include photographs of bulldozed bodies at Al Shifa, you should understand that these images are not recuperable, not explainable, and it isn't possible to reconcile them with anything other than the IDF using its international impunity to do atrocities.
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Oh hey, now that he's a senator, the guy whose wife was "undocumented for years" has discovered that undocumented immigrants are a real problem and we need to adopt GOP policies on the issue.
Immigration is personal for me. @giselefetterman lived in America undocumented for years after fleeing violence in Brazil when she was 7. I wouldn’t have a family if it weren’t for immigration. It's what makes America, America.
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could the NYT come up with a more DeSantis-friendly headline and framing?
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The Democratic party is in a very difficult situation, but, luckily, all the decisionmakers who will navigate that situations are the dumbest and most cowardly hacks you can imagine, you cannot believe the depth of their absence of vision and leadership.
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I'm the kind of squishy leftist voter who thinks "Bernie or Bust" is actually a bad idea but: if the Democrats nominate racist billionaire republican Mike Bloomberg, fuck them and every fucking horse they ever fucking rode, fuck them fuck him and fuck them.
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Women are going to die from ectopic pregnancies because of all the pseudo-religious zealots in state legislatures that insist an ectopic pregnancy is a baby, or don't care enough about the distinction, and they decided to run this.
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ICE tortured a white green card holder and it's not even clear why they would have wanted to, that's how off the leash these fuckers are
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Just thinking about how right Neely was to be "screaming in an aggressive manner" at a car full of human souls that would, as it turns out, murder him and watch approvingly as he was murdered.
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It's actually very in-line for how Trumpism gets misplaced that these MAGA bigots are from an all-boy private catholic school in a rich suburb of Cincinnati, but the class markers will get washed away as "students from Kentucky".
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everyone is roasting this, but the followup is almost worse, where he makes it clear that defeating China and maintaining American hegemony over the next century is his sense of what is at stake. that's the "inflection point" he thinks we're at.
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The 306 words Trump has written about Rex Tillerson on twitter:
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"we've declared x 'not a real country' and on that basis, we get to conquer and loot it" is the basic unit of european imperial history in the last, like, 300 years.
Israel's so-called Minister of Diaspora Affairs & Combatting Antisemitism, yesterday, posted that Lebanon is not even a country and Israel is "recalculating the borders" with intention of ethnically cleansing large parts of southern Lebanon and stealing the land.
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why does the larger purple city not simply eat the smaller city
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Let's try to figure out who did it right after we crack the case of who did the previous thousands of bombings in the last couple days.
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OK, this really is incredible; the FT reported an inflammatory statement by Israel's president, which went viral because it was horrific, and then, even though it was accurate, they REMOVED it from the article? How could there be a journalistic explanation for that?.
this language has now been removed from the article. The quote is authentic and was reported by several other outlets-> Archived version on the left, live version on the right
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I've mourned children that never came close to existing, I get it. I thought we were never going to have kids, and processing that was hard. But abortions save lives, and pretending ectopic pregnancies are babies will kill people, it's extremely simple.
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Because I was a grad student working in African studies in 2012, I cannot help but be snotty about the fact that half of Kyrsten Sinema's dissertation is an incredibly lengthy paraphrase of like four books that everybody reads
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Read a bit of Intermezzo and in my opinion, it continues to be the Sally Rooney thing: very deftly interested in the gap between the concreteness of words we use to communicate desires whose actuality those words fail to adequately express.
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A lot of very smart politics thinkers in the Democratic party think that they defeated the campus protest movement, and that it will never trouble them again, when mostly what happened is a thing called "summer vacation" which will end well in advance of the general election.
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Anyway, I'm delighted that they gave the Nobel to a writer whose major work is about "How do you live in a world where the state can just murder an unaccountable number of people, just massacre them, and then nothing changes, how can you live, how can you live".
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this is a good clarification of what they mean when they say "there was a ceasefire on October 6th".
The BBC is reporting that Israeli forces have opened fire on Palestinians trying to return to their homes in the north of the Gaza strip
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"on the one hand, the right wants to strip women of the rights to be full public citizens and chain them to their babies. on the other, I saw the word 'pregnant people' once.".
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Feel what you need to feel! And yes, medical professionals should be as sensitive as possible to people's emotional needs and beliefs. But those beliefs are being used to put policies in place that will kill people.
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That essay wants more "pro-life doctors." If being a "pro-life doctor" means sensitivity to people who want to use the word baby for non-viable pregnancies, sure. But let's not be rubes: a lot of times "pro-life doctor" is going to mean "letting nature take its course".
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Conservatives are always scandalized to find themselves not well-represented in the parts of academia that conservatives have spent the last 50 years trying to destroy.
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Having kids has really helped me understand how much and how deeply we learn and internalize a hatred and contempt of so many of the traits that children have, precisely because we vest our self-worth and self-respect in the conceit that we have grown up and shed them.
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It's a banal point probably, but my problem with Succession boils down to making the super-rich interesting and compelling as characters, with tragic depths, instead of making them boring weirdos for whom huge wealth is functionally equivalent to a severe cognitive impairment.
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The murder of Jordan Neely is ACTUALLY what everyone thought the murder of Kitty Genovese was.
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Maybe it's because my twins are only 5 weeks old, but when I think about any doctor or legislator who might even begin to contemplate restricting what doctors can do to preserve the life and health of a pregnant woman, I see shades of red I didn't know even existed.
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the first thing that guy who interviewed TNC said was "if we strip away your respectability, are you not an extremist?" and the last thing he said was "remember, we haven't yet, but we *can* uninvite you from respectability.".
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it's hard but important to remember that the last two years have been so awful to so many people, and so good to so many corporate bottom lines and stock prices, and that those two facts are not disconnected.
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Stupid or bad-faithed people often conflate the overall drop in aggregate fertility--the total number of babies people are having--with the idea that Lots of People are Choosing To Be Childless. The former is a real thing; the latter is basically an ideological figment.
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not to be all Marxist, but part of this is a psychological desire on the part of capitalists to believe that a thing you can buy, own, and invest (an intellectual property) is the source of value, not labor (the people working to make a site good).
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No state has a "right" to do anything; that's a category error. Rights are limitations on the power of the state.
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but when people abandon twitter for mastadon, will they carry the traditions of their homeland into the salt bread of exile? Canine surprise? Jail for mother? homie what set you from? babadook adults drinking wine? the candles tweet.
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It does certainly seem like these cops were, in every sense that matters, deputizing the people who would go on to shoot protesters last night!.
Cell phone video shows Kenosha Wisconsin police officers in an military vehicle telling armed White militia members they "appreciate them being there" and giving them bottled water; while in the background cops can be heard ordering protestors to disperse.
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Half the Democratic party right now: This GOP is so awful, you can't even SURRENDER to these people.
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a lot of people who are mad that Coates would suggest an oppressed person might use violence are also of the opinion that Israel destroying every hospital in Gaza is justified.
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Years of concern trolling about leftist "cancel culture" and "political correctness" and the NYT simply lacks the tools or desire to describe what is happening
Yesterday we logged almost 200 challenges- about 150 of those resulted in immediate removals. This is a picture of all the books removed from one HS library, in one day, in one District, due to the objections of one man. This is not freedom. #FreeTheBooks
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sobering to learn that journalism is being destroyed by a bunch of northwestern students and not by hedge funds, facebook, and reactionary billionaires.
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I'm glad the NYT did that Haiti story I guess, but it is pretty funny that a team of correspondents did an "investigative series" to discover shit written in any decent book on the subject.
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It was helpful for me to realize that when people insist that Israel isn’t committing a genocide, they tend not to be denying the reality what Israel is actually doing in Gaza, but changing what the word “genocide” means.
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Update: I bet it was the people who bombed it literally three days ago
A priest at the Anglican Diocese that owns the Gaza hospital struck this evening says he understands the hospital was previously struck by an Israeli missile last Saturday, causing multiple injuries.
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something about how Ta-Nehisi Coates was unquestionably the most well-known, respected, and liked pundits in the country, and he just decided to not be a pundit anymore.
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"Biden to end public health emergency" is a cool way to say "the government is going to pay for much less of what it costs to live in a pandemic".
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good illustration of the difference between people who think race is "real" in the sense of being an actual function of skin color and physiognomy and people who think race is made "real" through socio-political hierarchy.
On the left: Ahed Tamimi, Palestinian.On the right: Me, Israeli.Stop making this war about race.
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Put bluntly, "enthusiastically supported a genocide" is a stink that is gonna stick to a lot more people than they think.
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One of my favorite things about Better Call Saul is that the show is fundamentally very cynical about The Law, in a kind of implicit contradiction to the moralism of the Breaking Bad premise (where Walt turns evil by turning to crime).
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Fun story about WEB Du Bois is the time the US government took away his passport because he was a socialist activist against white supremacy.
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The farther the genocide of Palestine progresses--which is to say, the more it has become a thing in the past that for that reason can no longer be prevented by actions taken in the present--the more comfortable the West will get in saying that it was a bad thing.
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An interesting thing about this document is that "Zionist" is specifically protected, in great detail, in a way that other identity categories are not.
NYU updated their anti-discrimination policy to make “Zionist” a protected trait, so using it negatively can subject students to disciplinary action. They wrote in the same document that protesting off-campus does not “immunize” students from disciplinary action.
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a lot of the arguments against debt relief are also arguments against government funding for higher education (why should a PLUMBER'S TAXES be used to subsidize UNIVERSITIES), which sort of gives the game away.
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If you're a medium-sized city in America, there's no downside to just inventing a weird regional pizza style. "Oh, yeah, Fresno style? That's a white sauce and cornmeal crust, love a classic fresno pie .".
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everyone has already made this point a thousand times, but it really is staggering how many column inches were sloshed on the danger posed by censorious leftist college students.
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It's kind of dizzying how fast these campuses are just throwing maximum cops at the encampments immediately, basically from jump.
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FWIW, a lot of people are making out Angela Carini as the main bad actor in this fiasco, and it's not really true: “I’m sorry for my opponent, too. I want to apologize to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke.".
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I'm in a bubble, so let me ask: Does ANYONE think Harris cozying up to deeply hated monsters from the Dubya administration helps her get elected? Is there even a way to make the argument?.
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Any word on whether it was a good idea to put public universities in the hands of a business and political elite that find the very idea of a public trust to educate and serve the citizenry to be abhorrent and strange.
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Barbie is a reactionary movie about how, when the oppressed gender rises up and seizes power, they must be put back in their place and the ruling order restored, in service of commerce. Ken is Killmonger: his function is dramatize the oppressed rising up as a bad thing.
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Annual units moved:. UPS: 5.5 billion . FedEx: 2 billion. USPS: 142 billion.
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a fun thing about having twins is that when your health insurance rejects a valid claim, they do it for *different wrong reasons* for each twin, even though the visit was identical for both.
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It is remarkable how little it seems to matter that the Israeli right explicitly encouraged and supported Hamas so that they would have enemies the West could more easily demonize.
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy".
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calling a thing "performative" to say that it's bad, without then doing the work of explaining why that performativity is a bad thing, is an extremely common and lazy way to surf on reactionary currents, and we shouldn't do it.
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seeing people talk about how many pages they can read is weird; the point is to BUY them, if you buy a book, you don't have to read it, because you have defeated it, all its power is yours now.
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I hope these babies wake up and start crying soon because I need to log the fuck off.
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73k to 2k, and quite literally the difference between Biden winning and losing.
3 AZ counties on Navajo Nation went 97% for Biden. via @navajotimes.
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They're criminalizing teachers who let students access to books the state doesn't like (such as books by Black people), and the NYT is like "wow, about time someone took on those bullies in the education establishment".
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Of course the first "ex-Californian" series at the Chronicle features a tech guy who moved here 4 years ago, hates looking at homeless people, and wishes there were more cops
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(personally, I think the idea that anything "justifies violence" is a basic category error; violence is, definitionally, unjust. It sometimes be the least-bad, least cursed choice on offer, but justice is the absence of violence, not the correct application of it.).
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Obviously this country has way too many politically-motivated vigilantes and folks who are just lazy, uniformed, or confused, but, like, super-spreading events at jails, workplaces, and nursing homes aren't about people's refusal to defer pleasure.
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it is actually amazing how prominent Andrew Yang has become compared to how little he has actually done.
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Bret Stephens:."No wonder so much of America has dwindling sympathy with the idea of prolonging lockdown conditions much further.". 86% of the country:
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A useful way to think about the conflict, that I recommend, is: there has never been a war without war crimes, on both sides, and the only side in this war with the ability to call off the war--that it has been waging on Palestinians for 70 years now--is Israel.
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A reason you can't talk about Gaza with a lot of people is that a lot of people think the status quo on October 6th was peace, and when people disagree about that, nothing either side says will make any sense. One side is right, though, and the other side is wrong.
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peace and love to Martin Gugino, 75, in serious but stable condition at Erie County Medical Center as of Thursday night .
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My Joyce professor in college told us that he ripped American Psycho into three pieces and put each piece in a different trash can in a different terminal of the airport while on a layover, that's how much he hated it.
people talk a lot about throwing books across the room. i have never done that. does anyone really, genuinely do that?.
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fun fact! The 2006 "Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act" that permanently wrecks the Postal Services budget was co-sponsored by two Democrats and passed by a voice vote.
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In 2003, I was as antiwar as any other "no war for oil"-chanting marcher, but I do regret occasionally treating the case for war, and the people making it, with anything less than pure and total scorn, rage, and rejection.
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