It’s estimated 27 million Russians died during WW2. OP is saying that number is attributable to Hitler. The best estimate given the revealed USSR archives, emigres, and informants puts deaths directly caused or the result of neglect attributable to Stalin is 6.5 million.

Basically the first half of the meme is anticommunist, misinformation that ignores the deaths caused by fascists.

China’s energy grid is about 80% fossil fuels. Assuming their energy mixture remains unchanged (a bad assumption as their coal usage is on the decline) it would take about 65,000 miles for an EV’s carbon output to break even with an equivalent ICE vehicle.

The waste and suffering involved in carbon intensive fuels is ongoing instead of being single event. One benefit of renewable tech is the recyclability of it’s components. Once we’re made the battery it can be recycled and died not require ongoing extractive mining forever.

EVs have a place in a just future and can do some good at this time. Alternatives to cars are still a far more important and uncomplicated solution to our climate problems

Direct action gets the goods

Basically.

For example, tens of thousands of people die every year in the US because of inadequate access to health care. Universal payer would be cheaper and result in fewer preventable deaths. Centrists do not support the policy and thus are willing to let people die in order to support the parasitic insurance industry.

The genocide in Gaza, homelessness, prison industrial complex, climate change, etc. all get people killed in preventable ways. But we have to protect the owner class so we’re not going to do any of the clear solutions. Letting people die needlessly is an acceptable result.

Explain Like I’m Five

Libro.fm for stuff not at the library

Thanks! Fixed!

Trees can explode actually 😅 Eucalyptus and Aspen trees are know to explode during bush fires.

They don’t explode unbidden like you might assume given Trump’s comment. He seems to do this a lot; he talks about something real, in a way that demonstrates he’s garbage at communicating anything even remotely technical.

The real solutions is of course tending our forests to ensure there’s not enough combustible material to cause dangerous fires. More resources for the forest service is essential. It makes me wonder if these gaffs are far more effective at directing our attention away from the substance of the problem with Trump

Lower Decks was my first star trek show. I’ve been enjoying The Next Generation so far. The first season was pretty bad. The second season was pretty good. The third season has been real good

Hard cases make bad law. Make sure the Nazi’s rights weren’t infringed 😬

Mexico is a bad example IMO. The Zapatistas are right there. That’s a pretty significant bit of territory the Mexican State has very little control over.

The US has, through concerted effort by the right wing, forgotten why FDR came into power. He was the heir of an extremely rich family. He managed to convince enough of the other oligarchs to avert going the way of the USSR. The US had revolutionary potential or the powerful would not have let this happen.

The policies that resulted from FDR’s presidency had an enormous effect on the US’s populace. It completely changed what the average American expected from their government. The politics of the Democrats, and even the Republican, president’s that followed reflected the change that FDR’s policies wrought.

It took 40 years of concerted media, intellectual, and religious capture for the right to regain anything resembling the political ascendancy they saw before the 1930s.

Because billionaires are morally good, hard working, and smart. If a poor person was all those things they wouldn’t be poor /s

I’m going to vote for the democrat this November but I think most folks who talk about this issue are not disingenuous. Voting in the presidential election is a bare minimum, minimally effective political action. For me and most of the people I know it matters almost not at all because I don’t live in a swing state. My local elections matter a hell of a lot more.

There are limits to the effectiveness of electoralism that are worth understanding. I think a lot of folks who talk about the Democrat’s failures are advocating for political action beyond voting. Direct action is a far more effective form of political action that people should be putting their energies into.

Union organizing, renter’s orgs, housing activism, talking to your neighbors, local politics, and lots more are much more effective ways to assert power in your life. Voting makes me feel helpless. We need to act as well. The primary thing preventing positive political change is the belief that we can’t do anything to bring that change about.

That sort of thing can happen in extreme situations. Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany are the most prominent examples. Both examples involved not having enough stuff. When there aren’t enough necessary goods to buy and people have plenty of money you’re going to get inflation. Using the right combo of subsidies, government run production, purchase quantity limits, reserves, vouchers, and price fixing you can ensure the supply is stable and eliminate inflation even if there’s lots of money.

That’s true. That happens because people are stuck in the narrative of the government needing a balanced budget, just like a household. It also happens because the owners and the corpos use all their money and power to ensure workers pay taxes and thus decrease worker money and power.

Yeah, if the population was educated on MMT the ability to bring corpos to heel would be significantly increased. People arguing for it are fundamentally arguing for a change in how we think about money.

The nice thing about trials of corporations is discovery. We have evidence of Google intentionally making search worse, increasing the time spent looking for results, and this improving ad sales. All that came out in discovery.

Netanyahu has propped up Hamas for decades in order to separate the West Bank from Gaza. There hasn’t been an election in Gaza for 18 years so nobody there had had the opportunity to choose an alternative anyway. Hamas didn’t even get the majority of votes in that election. Finally, plenty of people who don’t support Hamas, like queer folks and babies, are being indiscriminately murdered by the IDF.

The people in this photo are making a not uncomplicated but ultimately moral stance.

You might reread my last sentence, I didn’t say anything about the EU.

The amount of material the US supplies to both Israel and the Saudis amounts to complicity. The tendency for the US to covertly cause coups throughout the world goes beyond complicity. The resulting government are almost always authoritarian and always support US economic interest. If Israel and the Saudis weren’t there to serve the US’s interests they would install someone who would.

I wish it was a simple issue of conservatism in the states causing this problem but is seems to be nonpartisan.

Al-Hirak is the most prominent

I like this Jacobin writeup of the recent history in Yemen if you’d like more context

The frustrating thing is both Hamas and the Houtis are as powerful as they are because of the massive suppression of alternatives by the various powers at play in their respective conflicts.

Israel picked Hamas to be it’s enemy. They suppressed the alternatives and funded Hamas.

In Yemen the government in the North and the Saudis are much more interested in fighting the Houtis than allowing the pro democratic forces to become ascendant.

This whole situation is the fault of US allies.