Including Montana.

Not sure I agree. I think many people who are “defeatist about voting” have observed that the surface-level differences between Democrats and Republicans (namely social issues and the more visible fascism from Republicans) just mask an underlying corporatist/fascist state that’s sacrosanct and immune from popular pressure and legislative change.

Re: “Obamacare” (which is just one tiny change mind you) - there were some marginal improvements like re: preexisting conditions, but mostly it seemed to increase compliance costs, my understanding is premiums have just continued rising and the fundamental issues causing healthcare scarcity and limiting competition have been made worse.

In effect, the bonds I mentioned are just inverted loans. The Treasury takes in $1k from payroll taxes for these programs, issues a bond to the trust fund saying “I owe you $1k plus interest”, spends the $1k on whatever (I guess primarily the discretionary budget) and eventually has to somehow generate money to pay it back with interest.

In terms of whether or not bonds were “borrowed” - this wouldn’t exactly matter in a meaningful sense, but I’m not clear this ever actually happened in the first place. There was some claim about, when the trust fund was mixed with the general fund 1968-1990, maybe the government took bonds out of the program, but you have to remember that inside the government, that’s not something of value, that’s just an obligation the government has to pay to itself, it’s a big nothing burger. The outstanding liabilities from Social Security to the actual beneficiaries (elderly people) exist regardless of how the government is doing their accounting internally.

Read any SS Trustees report. It doesn’t have “money”, it has debt instruments (bonds), which are essentially a document saying “we the government owe ourselves a thousand dollars”. You can print those all day, it’s only sourcing that money that has any kind of direct consequence (taxation, inflation, etc.).

And yes, that does raise an interesting question of, what did they do with the actual money we paid into the programs, if the only thing in the trust fund is bonds.

Social Security doesn’t have assets, it has debt obligations, which to the government, are something you can conjure out of thin air. The only senses in which it can “run out” is if outlays exceed receipts, or if it runs out of debt instruments to cash out and has to ask for a pile of more debt instruments.

That’s not the question.

The way you phrase it poses an impossible dilemma for Palestinian resistance. Non-violent resistance is outlawed and slaughtered (anti-BDS law, massacre of the Great March of Return, assassinations of peace activists, international smear campaigns, etc.). Violent resistance is impossible on equal standards as Israel maintains air superiority over occupied Palestine - separate infrastructure would be bombed. So we have a ghettoized population, under siege, under blockade, under air monitoring. What option is left for them? Hidden military infrastructure, tunnels, arms smuggling - and this all gets immediately condemned.

We try to hold these populations to the standards of international law - but morally, the abstraction starts to break down. It’s easy for a country like the U.S. to abide by some of these standards on the surface - we can have exposed military infrastructure, because we have SAM sites, we have intercontinental ballistic missiles, first-class fighter jets, etc. We’ve heard plenty about the perspectives that purport to justify the Israeli/U.S. offensive, that seem on the surface to make our military efforts legitimate. But (from the media at least) we rarely hear about the narratives in support of the opposing side - 75 years of ethnic cleansing, land theft, crushing military occupation, siege, perfidy, random massacres and apartheid. They have a legitimate cause and grievances. So we have to actually consider what avenues of recourse are even available to them to pursue that cause. Otherwise we’re essentially just telling them to “quiet down and die”. On the broader scale, it’s like saying, it’s forbidden to punch while you’re lying on the ground, while you tackle somebody and beat them to death.

That being said, of course certain things are both war crimes and not essential to resistance - i.e., killing unarmed civilians - to whatever extent Hamas militants actually did engage in this (we know they killed some, and we know the IDF killed some as well - as well as the 13-20k+ civilians Israel has killed at this point).

And this is not to give credence to Israeli claims of repurposing, either. The standard under international law is to prove that each individual peace of infrastructure is actively being used for military purposes, and that its strategic value outweighs the casualties from shelling it, and Israel has not been meeting that standard overall by any metric.

You used to support (Palestine) but then the (entire 5M current population of Palestinian) paraded innocent cadavers through their streets?

Not sure if you’re posting this as support of IDF claims. The videos they’ve released have been absolutely ridiculous, show multiple signs of planted evidence (e.g. the same scene completely changing when shown to different news outlets) and do not support the assertion of a sophisticated underground command center.

Just like Shifa Hospital isn’t used as a terrorist base.

Despite the raid ~24 hours ago, and the release, deletion and then re-release of an “uncut” video of the hospital since then, this absolutely remains to be proven. If anything the burden of proof has gone up, after the absolute bullshit they just published about it and about Rantisi hospital.

Also it’s “Al Shifa”, as in, “The Healing”.

“Godwin’s Law” only said that the comparison to Nazis becomes inescapable the longer a conversation goes (not the common interpretation “whoever says Nazi first loses”). If I remember right he actually went back later and said it’s perfectly fine to draw the Nazi analogy to fascist states.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/despite-bidens-doubts-humanitarian-agencies-consider-gaza-toll-reliable-2023-10-27/

The health ministry is a medical organization, regardless of being under Hamas rule.

Yeah, Hamas isn’t as bad as Israel, it’s literally a resistance movement to the people that ethnically cleansed their population from their land and kept them in a concentration camp for two decades. The unbalanced condemnation tbph is the result of a concerted Israeli/Western propaganda campaign to obscure the context and nature of the attacks, including the hundreds of Palestinian people killed in 2023 before Oct. 7, and more fundamentally, the fact that Israel has been keeping 2.4M people in a high-tech concentration camp for the last two decades.

The atrocity claims against Hamas from Oct. 7 have some serious evidentiary issues at this point, even including some unknown number of the civilian deaths being attributable to the IDF (literally firing at, shelling and bombing Israeli citizens - though to be clear, there is video of Hamas shooting civilians as well). You compare this to the inhuman genocide being levied against Palestinians now - food, water, electricity, fuel, medicine being cut off for 5 weeks at this point, likely upwards of 20,000 civilians killed, at least half of the buildings in Gaza damaged or destroyed, attacks on hospitals, schools, refugee camps, ambulances, journalists, aid workers, without legitimate substantiation of their repurposing for military purposes - these are crimes against humanity. There is no equivalence here.

Maybe the U.S. upvoted that to discredit China /j

Russia arguably gains via ties with Iran and decrease of U.S. influence in the region. But, as far as news, reporting, information are concerned, it’s pretty irrelevant, if there’s actual propaganda then let it be shown and debunked, and even Iranian RT right now is barely saying anything surprising to anyone who’s been watching what’s happening on the ground.

It’s grotesque to me people that keep repeating this. The accusations of genocide almost universally relate to after Oct. 7. And population growth over a 60 year stretch does not discredit incitement to genocide or actions taken to attempt genocide.

The comparisons to the Nazis are actually inescapable. I struggle to think of a centrally orchestrated and mechanized system of apartheid/oppression and now genocide that’s more similar.

Honestly, I saw his most recent interview, he was supporting the continuation of hostilities (urging restraint and all that) until Hamas was removed. Then I watched the hour long Norman Finkelstein response to it, going over his premises in excruciating detail - https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2023/11/06/18860126.php I don’t think your portrayal of his statements is accurate.

That’s an odd response to what I wrote…what I said is that the two choices are becoming more and more evil, not that they are evil in the first place. Which is not how that phrase has typically been used (to justify selecting the lesser of the two evils).

Which, side note, may make sense in the context of, there are actually only two choices. But what we do is collectively lock ourselves into those two choices and then choose between them, when there are not only other parties and independent candidates we could support, but entirely separate political systems we could move to.

“Lesser of two evils” is sure slipping more and more towards “evil”, isn’t it.