“losses based on data from rural towns”

What does this mean and how would someone be able to verify these numbers?

Barring some unforeseen demographic situation in the electoral college

What do you mean by that?

Computer science isn’t science

Why not?

Fun fact! In the Netherlands, Elsevier publishes a weekly magazine about politics, which is basically the written version of Fox News for that country. Very nice that those people control like 50% of all academic publishing.

Thank you!

Do you remember where you read that?

protesting over something so insignificant and inconsequential

Yes and no. The thing itself is small and inconsequential, but the subtext is a protest in favour of joining the EU and joining Schengen. The fact that relatively important EU-politicians are there to speech to the protesters makes that all the more clear.

(Imagine the opposite: like the head of the foreign affairs committe of Belarus talking to anti-governement-protsters in a EU-country. They’d be kicked out of the country immediatly and Belarus got themselves some extra sanctions.)

Psy was revealed to be singing metal songs advocating for the killing and torture of American soldiers as revenge for the murders of Koreans and Iraqis

Hahaha, no fucking way. Can you link that?

our pressure isn’t working

That’s not true. Evergreen state college is divesting because of student demands. Basically every university in Spain as well, in Belgium the Free University of Brussels is divesting and in Ireland Trinity college as well. This is just the beginning.

You’re forgetting PTB-PVDA: the only marxist-leninst party in Europe with amazing poll numbers. Currently around second place (in a landscape with twelve parties) in the polls for the election in June.

This makes me so incredibly sad. How did opposition to an apartheid state which is enacting a collective punishment on a population which it has locked up in an open air prison for decades become so controversial? There’s really not even the slightest form of humanity in our elite, nothing at all.

The text below is from Kevin Ovenden, an Irish marxist who founded an organisation to bring aid to Palestine during the 2009 war, and who as aboard the flotilla in 2010 which tried breaking the Israeli Blockade, which was violently attacked by the IOF.

"It’s absolutely true that the impact of Israel’s killing of seven WCK aid workers casts a harsh light on those who only now complain about this going “too far” after the slaughter of over 30,000 Palestinians and 196 other aid workers.

We should make that point as we seize on this moment to build more widely and to isolate Israel where we are.

But it is not helped by some memes and lazy arguments going around. Those talk of the deaths of “seven white people” at the hands of Israel.

That isn’t true. One was Palestinian and a second was Indian-Australian. Not white.

I think some of this comes from not really pausing to think and find out, combined with an extremely annoying habit of people trying to force everything into North American notions of “white skin privilege”.

The perversity of that in this case is that it erases the Palestinian-ness of one of the victims and the mixed heritage of another, of the kind that can still raise eyebrows at passport control in parts of the world."

Unlike the Houthis, they’re away from home with few creature comforts.

Those Houti´s really have all the comforts, unlike American soldiers

The current elite in Indonesia came to power by desposing the left-wing nationalist Sukarno and by murdering 2 million people suspected of being members of the Communist Party. It had 1 million members at that time. To this day, the perpetrators of that genocide walk around freely, and are celebrated as heroes for “saving the nation” from the “communist traitors”. There’s a museum which celebrates the genocide of the communists and the purpetrators are often on TV talking about how they murdered the inhabitants of village X or Y because it was a hotbed of communism.

For those who want to learn more about this forgotten history, read The Jakarta Method, a book about the Indonesian Genocide and how it functioned as a model for anti-communists all over the Globe (Guatemala, Chile…) and watch the film The Act of Killing, in this film a couple of participants are asked to reenact their killing of communists for a documentary (which they happely do, and in painstaking detail, because the only feedback they’re accustomed to is praise for their acts) which provides a horryfying insight into the way the killing of our comrades is looked at. It’s basically impossible to watch the film in Indonesia, to quote wikipedia.

it is highly risky to submit The Act of Killing, titled Jagal in Indonesian, to the Film Censorship Board, since the probability of it being banned would mean Indonesians can face charges for watching the film, and allowing paramilitary groups to heckle screenings

horrible

I had a libertarian manager who used to say “What has Bernie ever actually done?”. Hate to hand it to him,

Of al the criticisms one can have of Sanders, this one really annoys me. Offcourse he “doesn’t get annything done”, because all other people there are the worst monsters imaginable, who’re only trying to get tax cuts for their donors. That’s a criticism of them, not of Sanders. The problem is that there is no broader movement agitating around these sort of bills, not that they’re voted down. These bills are a meager form of pressure on the elite, their existence is a net positive.

Russia, a country that (…) has an economy the size of Italy

Not engaging in the rest of this debate, but this is misleading. If you just look at GDP, that’s true, but if you look at GDP PPP (purchasing power parity), it’s the §th economy of the world, right after Germany. PPP means that you don’t just translate roebels into dollars, but that you check what you can actually buy with it.

It’s scary how little debate this entails. Our countries are in war in Yemen, and I’d say 80% of the public doesn’t even know it.

They’re pretty stable in the polls.

Since the link goes to the homepage, I didn’t believe it at first. Here’s the archived version of the article, for my fellow skeptics: https://archive.is/1IdVZ