queermunist

And you all told me the blue maga border bill that Republicans rejected was 4d chess.

In Khan Younis, many of those taking flight on Monday were already displaced from other areas. Abu Mohammed told Reuters it was now the third time he had been forced to flee since abandoning his home in Gaza City in the north.

"Why did they eject us from our homes in Gaza (City) if they planned to kill us here?" he said.

At a home in Khan Younis that was struck overnight, flames licked the collapsed masonry and grey smoke billowed out from the rubble. A child's stuffed toy of a sheep lay in a pile of dust. Boys were picking through the wreckage. Next door, Nesrine Abdelmoty stood amid damaged furniture in the rented room where she lives with her divorced daughter and two-year-old baby.

"We were sleeping at 5 a.m. when we felt things collapse, everything went upside down," she told Reuters. "They told (people) to move from the north to Khan Younis, since the south is safer. And now, they've bombed Khan Younis. Even Khan Younis is not safe now, and even if we move to Rafah, Rafah is not safe as well. Where do they want us to go?"

The end of the article jumped out at me:

The Palestinian health ministry said 40 patients died on Tuesday, after five days without the fuel needed to power generators that fed dialysis machines and other vital medical equipment. The hospital had also run out of clean water, and doctors said they were subsisting on dates to survive as food supplies dwindled to nothing.

Corpses were piled in front of the hospital, with staff too terrified to move between buildings. The UN’s office for humanitarian affairs said staff at al-Shifa, for decades the linchpin of Gaza’s medical system, had begun preparations for a mass grave to entomb 180 bodies in front of the facility, as there was no way for them to leave in order to bury the dead.

Of particular note:

The Association of American Railroads, which represents freight railway operators, said its members have been hiring in recent years to address staffing needs and recognize employees' desire for better scheduling. The group said the number of overtime hours worked by BMWE union members increased to 4.7 hours per week in 2022, compared to 4 hours in 2016.

Cory Ludwig, who works as a machine operator repairing railway tracks in Iowa, said he’s been working Saturdays and some Sundays along with 10- to 12-hour shifts since September. Recently, he worked 13 days without a day off. With the mandatory Saturday work, he’s had to rely on friends and relatives to take care of his five-year-old and nine-year-old kids. He said the overtime demands have increased as he’s seen the number of workers assigned to his crew go down.

“You fall asleep and then you wake up in the morning and you go right back to work. It can really break a person down, it gets really wearing on a person after a while,” Ludwig said. “With less people trying to do the same amount of work, working long hours, working multiple weeks in a row without one day off, you get irritated and you get burnt out.”

Recently one of the union’s members had been working 22 hours straight when he fell asleep on the job, an error that could have put his colleagues’ lives at risk but also could have been avoided had the employee had a rest period, said Ballew. Another member was recently disciplined for refusing to work through his scheduled days off on short notice so he could care for a family member having health issues, Ballew said.

“The stress it puts on marriages and parenting and the things you leave behind for your spouse to deal with or the things you miss, that kind of stress builds up,” said Ballew. “In the rail industry, we have noticed recently a spat of suicides and I can’t help but think there is a correlation there.”

Thank God Biden stopped the railroad strike!

I swear if I hear another fucker say that the railroad workers got everything they wanted because Biden helped them negotiate I'll lose it.

Good thing I voted for the lesser evil in 2020! Gosh if I had stuck to principles we'd have had a genocide or something 😒

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Clear enough, right?

Under this definition Israel's occupation and war of extermination is absolutely genocide, unquestionably. The goal is to kill, mutilate, and displace the Palestinian people. The goal is the total ethnic cleansing of Gaza, by any means necessary. Israel's war on Gaza is genocide.

However, under this definition are the completely justified goals of Hamas also genocide? They intend to destroy the settler-colonial monstrosity that is Zionism and eradicate the nation state of Israel; Palestine from the river to the sea. That, technically, means they are committed with intent to destroy the national group of Israelis by displacement, death, or simply making them into Palestinians after destroying Israel's government.

That doesn't seem right to me. I am absolutely in solidarity with Hamas and Palestine in their struggle against the Zionist entity. An occupied people destroying their occupier's government and settler identity can't be considered genocide, because it creates this legal and ethical equivalency with the settlers.

And yet, technically, that seems to be the case. Am I wrong?

And, by pointing out this technicality, am I just a dog for Zionism?

The nug:

While assertions have been made by both sides about the incident and death toll, the available evidence is less clear. However, analysis of the video footage rules out most explanations aside from an Israeli strike.

The devastation underlines the heightened risk civilians are facing as tens of thousands flee the north, on Israeli orders, during hostilities. The bodies of at least three children can be seen in multiple clips verified by the FT.

At least 1,400 Israelis have been killed, according to the government, including many women and children. At least 2,500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombardment, about half of them women and below the age of 18, according to Palestinian officials.

On Saturday, Israel told Gazans that it would refrain from bombing two evacuation routes for six hours, including Salah-ad-Din street, where these explosions took place, so that civilians could continue to move south

Following months of negotiations with Teamsters, UPS announced in June that it would install air conditioning in new trucks starting next year. The company said it would send new trucks to the hottest parts of the country first, if possible. The company also said it would retrofit its existing package cars with cab fans, exhaust heat shields, and cargo area ventilation.

"While these improvements will make a difference in the months and years ahead, we had to fight like hell to secure them," the Teamsters union said in its social media post Thursday. "Chris Begley should still be alive to experience them. All companies, including UPS, need to remember that their past failings to protect workers can have deadly serious consequences in the future."

Chris Bagley should still be alive and it's a damn shame the Teamsters failed to protect him from social murder. Only new trucks? Only next year? They drove trucks without fans, heat shields, and ventilation? What the fuck.

The Teamsters could have, at the very least, demand a total halt on driving trucks without fucking fans. "Oh but that'll cause package delays!" Well I guess we just have to murder drivers for the sake of logistics.

If anyone tells me how great and historic the new contract is one more fucking time I'll fucking lose it.

I want to read you two recent headlines from New York magazine. They were written within a week of each other. The first is “A.O.C. Is Just a Regular Old Democrat Now,” and that accuses you of compromising on your progressive ideals as you work within the party system. And then came the rebuttal, which was “The ‘A.O.C. Left’ Has Achieved Plenty,” which argued that your wing has pushed the party leftward. Why do you think your role is still being parsed this way by Democrats and by those on the left?

Part of it is because we haven’t really had a political presence like this in the United States before. I think very often you had this consummate insider that was bankrolled by corporate money and advancing this, frankly, very neoliberal agenda. And those were the people that we were used to seeing in power. And so I think over time there’s been an inherent association between power, ascent and quote-unquote selling out.

I often say to my grass-roots companions that the left, for a very long time, was not used to having power in the United States. And so when we encounter power, we’re so bewildered by it —

Yes, the reason we are suspicious of you is because we're too fucking stupid to understand. Thank you boss queen!!!

Moving your ideas internationally, even if they might conflict with the foreign policy of the leader of your own party?

I wouldn’t necessarily characterize my foreign policy goals as oppositional to the president’s or to the United States. I am a member of Congress. I have sworn an oath to this country, and I take that oath very seriously.

That says it all, doesn't it?

Do you feel more comfortable in the Democratic Party now? The way you described it initially was fraught. They rejected you, and you were definitely trying to change the party. You have said you’ve pushed the party leftward. Many would agree. So is it OK to be a regular Democrat now?

The activist in me always seeks to agitate for more. I think despite there being progress, many people are still woefully underserved in this country. But the Democratic Party has changed dramatically in the last five years. Even if you just look at the numbers, I believe it’s something around 50 percent of House Democrats have been elected since 2018. And so what is considered center and moderate now is dramatically different than what it was five years ago.

No no wait, that says it all.

Being center and moderate is good now folks!

Look at it! What is that? It looks kind of like a cross section of a human, kind of, except the eyes are pools of blackened fire and the brain is sending electrical pulses out to... are those Jupiters? Why? Why??? This is absolute nightmare shit lol

Rather than struggling to rebalance the division of labor between breadwinning and caregiving, why not spread the roles out more broadly among a greater number of committed adults?

HMM YEAH WHY NOT HMMMMMM

“Given all of the physical, financial, mental, and emotional labors of raising children,” a college professor colleague of mine explained to me, “why wouldn’t you want to spread that around?” He spent over a decade as one of three legal parents to his now adult twins, and although he believes the arrangement worked out well for everyone involved, he preferred to remain anonymous because formal tri-parenting is still so rare.

We used to fucking do that before capitalism crammed us all into nuclear families, and now that capitalism has entered decay we're finding out that we need extended families. But do they recommend moving in with parents or siblings? Nah. If families didn't keep buying new houses then how would the economy grow???

Finally, as increasing numbers of millennials and members of Generation Z decide to forgo childbearing in protest against climate change, the housing crisis, or the growing precarity of their financial futures in a brutal gig economy, the growing acceptance of alloparenting might offer unique opportunities for them to experience parenthood. Rather than struggling to rebalance the division of labor between breadwinning and caregiving, why not spread the necessary roles out more broadly among a greater number of committed adults?

"Finally, as increasing numbers of people see the end of the world approaching and wish only for a quick death, the growing acceptacne of alloparenting might allow them to get a taste of what was once a fundamental human experience!"

You will own nothing and be happy.