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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.








  • I’d point you to the assassin of John Lennon - he is/was a big Beatles fan but murdered John anyway because of who John became. That still doesn’t have anything to do with the parallel argument, in this case, of the likelihood that Mark was pretending to be a Beatles fan or not.

    Actions do speak louder than words - this would-be assassin registered as a Republican. The conspiracy theory that he was trying to affect a Primary makes no sense based on timing alone, let alone there not being an iota of evidence indicating he wasn’t a Republican. Republicans created the environment for this kid to do what he attempted to do and they should own up to their culpability rather than rely on bots and useful idiots to blame everyone but themselves for this problem.