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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • We don’t have sample ballots yet, but this matches our local reporting:

    Now LaRose is abusing his position on the Ohio Ballot Board to paint Issue 1 in a comically negative light. The Ohio Constitution bars ballot language that would “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters.” Yet the board’s description of the amendment states that it would create “a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts” to produce “partisan outcomes” (emphasis added). It also declares that the amendment would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved by nearly three-quarters of Ohio electors participating in the statewide elections of 2015 and 2018,” a gratuitous reference to the failed reforms of the previous decade.

    This is grossly misleading of what we approved in the past.




  • I understand that a line has to be drawn somewhere, and frankly it doesn’t matter how far back either’s claim goes - there are significant numbers of Palestinians and Israelis who have only known the current boundaries and any changes fundamentally alter their identities. Sure, we can go into the genocides committed against the Jews in the region over the past 2000 years that expelled them from the area and gives cause to antisemites that call Jews “white”, or violence perpetrated by Europeans when breaking up the Ottoman Empire and stoking ethnic violence over the past 100. But those claims only matter to the extremists as wedge issues used to divide.

    Extremists shouldn’t get to determine the future of millions who clearly want to live peacefully together. No one can bring back the murdered, but Israel, regional powers, the US, and European countries owe it to humanity to rebuild the destroyed cities in the same fashion that we intend to rebuild Ukraine.


  • Israelis and Palestinians aren’t monoliths and both groups generally want to coexist peacefully in a region they both have legitimate historical ties to. Yes, to stop the current fighting a ceasefire is needed. However, a ceasefire is not going to solve the problem of the IDF’s unrestricted killing of civilians as bystanders in response to Hamas directly targeting civilians as part of their genocidal aims towards Jews (in general).

    Just because the Israeli government has more power doesn’t suddenly make Israelis the “baddies.” There’s a reason why Palestinians, and other regional groups, want Hamas gone and look to the West Bank for the PLO to lead the future of a Palestinian state. Hamas takes actions without caring what happens to the people of Gaza as long as they get to kill some Jews (and inspire their killing globally) and provoke disproportionate retaliation from Netanyahu to feed back into their system of civilian oppression.

    The moment lasting peace settles in the region, Netanyahu can’t continue to avoid his personal legal problems, Hamas can’t reach their goal of a global Jewish genocide, and Iran can’t continue to destabilize the region and avoid its own internal instability. The fact that weapons manufacturers don’t get to profit from this stability is also a global win.

    The goal is to prevent the killing of Palestinian civilians and to restore their self-governance where they’re settled- also to rebuild. It should be fairly obvious that Hamas is the biggest roadblock. The IDF can then focus on right-wing settlers breaking Israeli law and restore those settlements back to Palestinians in their new state.







  • Biden did not “strike it down”, he halted all EOs not in effect so their administration can review them (see: the first paragraph of the linked article). Instead of re-issuing an EO, something that can be withdrawn on a whim (see: your post), Biden did the actual hard work of working with Congress to help pass the Inflation Reduction Act. The $35 cap is now backed by law rather than by diktat. Trump took the lazy path and issued the EO in the last days of his Presidency - a Presidency he spent quite a long time using to try and repeal the Affordable Care Act.

    Try understanding the issue instead of spamming MAGA talking points.



  • No, Romney made that rhetorical statement and Blinken looked flabbergasted that the statement was even made.

    Romney’s statement was made in the context, ironically, that certain social media “news” is made in the absence of any historical context as appeals to emotions instead of facts. The fact that the Twitter poster made an obvious cut to give “context” to Romney’s strange claim is an example of what Blinken said is wrong with certain social media news “sources”.

    TikTok ban discussions have been going on for a long time, well prior to Hamas’s October attack, and it’s a distortion of reality to claim motives otherwise.

    Romney should not be a role model for anything other than uncompassionate conservatism. If this type of “news” article is indicative of how many people get their information, then reality really is fluid for a whole lot of people and that’s scary. Though it’s hardly unsurprising with the amount of obvious propaganda sites posting “news” about the conflict that people take as gospel.




  • And what Hamas is trying to accomplish is also genocide - but this is all besides the point. The larger question is this: what would it take for you to believe even a fraction of what the Israeli military claims?

    Can it be true that the IDF is indiscriminately killing Palestinian civilians as well as telling the truth?

    Would you claim that Hamas is justified in their killing of civilians if the Israeli military also kills civilians?

    Even further: what happens if all foreign governments stop sending aid to Israel and Lebanon/Hamas/etc. attack Israeli citizens with the intent of purging them? Would you suddenly support the IDF in it’s struggle to protect Israeli citizens from these groups who have already made it clear that their primary purpose is the genocide of the Jews in the Levant?

    Regardless of anyone’s feelings on the IDF, it is incumbent on all of us to take the claims of Hamas and Israel with a massive grain of salt - you may not believe in the credibility of the IDF but you certainly cannot dismiss the engrained antisemitism of Hamas and others in the region and believe them at face value.


  • Which is more likely for underground tunnels that don’t hold many people and are kitted for permanent subterranean living:

    1. a safe place for a terrorist organization’s leadership and inner circle to plan attacks with the easy ability to traverse the city unknown
    2. temporary bomb shelters for the population of Gaza

    At what point will people, who bend over backwards to defend a designated terrorist organization who exclusively target civilians, admit that the conflict is more complicated than “Israel bad” - when Hamas revives indiscriminate bus bombings of Israelis (or do they pine for the 90s/2000s again)? Netanhanyu needs to go, but Hamas doesn’t even try to distinguish between military targets and civilians - all Israelis are military targets (genocide). The victims in this conflict are Palestinian and Israeli civilians and this needs to not be forgotten in their haze of Israeli bloodlust.