🇵🇸 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️

The linked article about the root cause of homophobia in Palestine has nothing to do with BDS. Hamas being a far-right Islamist organization, that is homophobic, doesn’t justify the actions of Israel or the corporations that are complicit in their genocide. Israel’s right to defend itself isn’t a blank check to violate international law or commit crimes against humanity. The Palestinians aren’t represented by Hamas. So the fact Hamas is homophobic doesn’t mean all Palestinians are homophobic. Israel’s current government, which is fascist, is lead by Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s goals are preventing Palestinian statehood and staying out of prison. Netanyahu is not interested in freeing Palestinians or freeing queer Palestinians.

How so? Pinkwashing corporations that are complicit in Israel’s genocide and the Republican Party sound like shared antagonistic organizations to me.

Is this what the picture refers to?

https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-does-kurwa-bobr-mean-polish-beaver-video-memes-explained

The groups that want to take away the rights of gay men and queer people in general are the same groups that want to take away the rights of the Palestinians. Since we are in a shared struggle against the same organizations there is no dilution of effort in taking up each other’s causes. edit: typo

https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

Here is an excerpt from Project 2025 from page 481.

Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.

For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father. Despite recent congressional bills like the Respect for Marriage Act that redefine marriage to be the union between any two individuals, HMRE program grants should be available to faith- based recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.

Republicans view heterosexual marriages as superior to homosexual marriages. Republicans came for Roe v. Wade and they are going to come for Obergefell v. Hodges. Gay men aren’t done fighting for their rights no matter how old they are. Using intersectionality as a road map to allies in our fight for LGBTQ+ rights is essential. This includes the Palestinian people. Allowing ourselves to be divided plays right into the hands of the people who want to take our rights away.

https://femmagazine.com/feminism-101-what-is-pinkwashing/

Pinkwashing was first used to refer to companies that superficially supported breast cancer awareness. It has since been used to refer to companies that superficially support queer people. Given the context of the op’s article, pinkwashing or rainbow-washing could be used interchangeably. Using pinkwashing to refer to companies using the pink ribbon for disingenuous marketing campaigns is still a valid usage of the term.

There was an idea, Musk doesn’t know this, called the Unforced Errors. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable deathtraps, see if they could become something less. See if they could fail together when we needed them to to lose the battles we never could.

This year, in part due to growing global support for Palestinians, an analysis of pinkwashing is on more people’s tongues than ever before. Ghanem and Koval both organize in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Out! Raleigh Pride, the city’s major pride event, agreed to join the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement for the first time this year. This week the organizers of Out! Raleigh Pride confirmed via email that they will give back funds the organization received from pro-Israel entities in order to become BDS compliant. That may make Raleigh the first major mainstream pride event in the U.S. to formally join the BDS movement.

Queer people should support the Palestinian people. Pinkwashing has become increasingly ridiculous. Corporations are signaling they support queer people and then donating to Republicans. Israel’s genocide isn’t improving the conditions of queer people anywhere or spreading tolerance of any kind. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be used as a wedge issue against the interests of the Palestinians when corporations have no interests upholding or forwarding the rights and aspirations of either group.

https://popular.info/p/these-25-rainbow-flag-waving-companies

It depends how upcasted the first wizard’s spell was.

I took a lot of tests for autism as a kid because I would stand on my toes. All the specialists said I wasn’t autistic. I got my hamstrings stretched and I stopped standing on my toes.

Thank you!

So they’ve been telling for the past two years while the front line has barely moved.

I already debunked this false claim in my argument.

It’s not a matter of what I want to believe. (To paraphrase Ben Shapiro, facts don’t care about my feelings.)

Facts can’t care about anything. Being tempted implies you want the thing that is being offered. I want to know why you would want to be lied to, because it’s a weird thing to want. Also, your argument provides no facts and misrepresents Russian defeats by Ukraine as strategy that Russia does not have.

There are two competing narratives out there, and one fits the evidence I can see while the other is getting increasingly hard to believe.

There is the truth and Russian propaganda. Your argument has no evidence to support it.

Also, to bring this discussion back to the original topic at hand, Biden is a neo-liberal and Trump is a fascist. They are not the same. Thus it is reasonable that a group that is against Trump’s fascist MAGA movement is anti-fascist.

Me right now too. I was thinking about this episode recently. I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be comparable to. I guessed dodging traffic on a highway, but that didn’t seem right. Getting hooked on drugs makes sense though.

Russia says the attack on Kyiv was to destroy munition supplies and wasn’t intended to be an occupation.

That’s a lie.

I can’t know if that’s true or not

Google it. The truth is knowable.

but Russia hasn’t tried any other attacks on Kyiv

That’s because Russia is losing the war.

so I’m tempted to believe it.

Why would you want to believe the lies of a fascist dictatorship? Your argument boils down to mistaking Russia’s defeats at the hands of Ukraine as a nonexistent strategy.

Wow. In just four years. How inspiring.

Biden has accomplished everything with a razor thin majority in Congress in the first two years and then a Republican controlled House in the second two years. It’s impressive.

Good? NATO should have been dismantled when the Cold War ended.

Putin wants to conquer Europe. This is bad. The ideology is essentially a version of manifest destiny where Russia expands westward until it consumes all of Europe. Also, of course the members of NATO need to maintain their armies.

If Russia wanted to conquer Ukraine, they would have done so already.

No, NATO countries have been supplying weapons to Ukraine.

I know I’ll be accused of being on Russia’s side for saying that, but I’m not. I’m just looking at the evidence.

Your argument should provide that evidence rather than pretending it exists. Russia’s fascist authoritarian dictatorship has led to military incompetence.

Russia has always described this conflict as a liberation of the Donbas. They took Donbas in just two weeks and since then have been mostly just maintaining their new borders.

Russia tried to take Kyiv and lost.

The media want us to think that Russia wants to annex Ukraine and the only reason they haven’t advanced is because the Ukraine army is so awesome. And yet this awesome Ukraine army hasn’t managed to retake any territory in two years.

Here are some maps that show what has actually happened in the war:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60506682

Ukraine retook territory by November 2022 which is in the last two years.

Also, Ukraine only recently got the green light to strike into Russian territory. This is already having a huge impact on the war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8qVOdygE2g

He wants to deport illegal immigrants, which is the same thing the Democrats want. Biden’s rhetoric on immigration lately is just as hardline as Trump’s.

Trump wants to round up 15 to 20 million people into camps and then deport them. The magnitude of this does not match what the Democrats want to do.

I followed the link you posted in your argument. This is what I found:

Barring some miraculous breakthrough, on Saturday the current government shutdown will become the longest in American history. But it has already hit another historic milestone: It is, by far and away, the stupidest government shutdown in American history. Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates

In 2019, the federal government will spend a whopping $4.407 trillion. Yet Congress and the president are shutting down the government in a dispute between the $1.3 billion the Democrats have approved for border security and the $5.7 billion the president is demanding — the difference being precisely 0.0998 percent of the total federal budget. In Washington, that is considered a rounding error.

This is about a government shutdown. Other than the misleading title, the Democrats do not want to build Trump’s border wall. Nor is this evidence that Democrats want to deport 15 to 20 million people.

And what are Democrats going to do for homeless people? Are the Democrats going to launch a mass housing iniative for them?

Newsom wants to doing something similar to what Trump has proposed, there’s a whole court case that has made it to the Supreme Court about breaking up homeless camps. The case started in Oregon, but has implications for California. But Newsom actually wants to provide housing and services to people. Newsom erroneously believes these need to be forced on people. When Trump talks about rounding homeless people up it’s to put them in death camps.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/oregon-homelessness-case-supreme-court-california.html

While well intentioned by Democrats, it’s going to backfire if Trump takes office. Under Trump, homeless people are going to end up in either prisons or death camps which will end up being the same thing.

Trump seems to love the death penalty. This reporting suggests Trump wants to use firing squads.

Democrats aren’t much different in practice. They’re just nicer about it.

Neo-liberal Democrats wanting to maintain the status quo isn’t the nice version of christo-fascist Republicans wanting to kill millions of people.

(he’s the only president in recent history who didn’t start any new wars)

Trump emboldened Putin to continue his war. Trump emboldened Erdoğan to attack the Kurds. Trump emboldened the Taliban to retake Afghanistan. Trump not declaring war is not a measure of success. He destabilized the world the last time he was in office. Under another Trump term we are likely to see China invade Taiwan and North Korea invade South Korea.

But even when it comes to domestic matters, he’s not substantially different enough from the Democrats to make me want to support Joe Biden after what Biden has done.

Biden got an infrastructure deal done and has cancelled some student debt, among other things. This has a list Biden’s foreign and domestic accomplishments:

https://www.upworthy.com/joe-biden-s-23-greatest-achievements-as-president-of-the-united-states-so-far

As opposed to Trump’s crime spree:

https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-donald-trumps-three-indictments-78-felony-charges-1816951

Reviewing the evidence shows a stark difference between Biden, a neo-liberal, and Trump, a fascist. The difference between another Biden term and another Trump term is that millions of lives can be saved under another Biden term. Where as Trump will usher in a christo-fascist dictatorship that will end our democracy and destabilize the world. These are vastly different outcomes. edit: typo

One possible scenario for spillover into the population: a raw-milk drinker or a farmworker gets infected with this strain of H5N1 that’s moving among cattle and also gets co-infected with a human-adapted strain of influenza. In such a situation viruses can swap genes in a process called reassortment. A major fear about H5N1 has always been that it might do this. H5N1 has shown it can easily move from one species to another, acquiring new genetic material in the process.

Airborne diseases don’t acknowledge party registration, voting habits, or political identification. If H5N1 does reassort with influenza it’s going to be killing humans.

No, at the time the principle was a woman. She was one of the those career administrators who raises kids tests scores by any means necessary and then takes a better job in a larger town with a bigger school. The principle before that was a teacher who took the job because no one else wanted it.

I’m not sure who was in charge of Learning Lab. They mostly helped kids who needed to improve their academic performance, including myself. They used the same space as the researchers, I don’t know how it was organized or where the researchers were from. Just that the pool of kids who were pulled out of class for Learning Lab was the same pool who interacted with any researchers. I don’t know how many kids had the same experience as me. At least one, probably more.

edit: There was someone who was like a teacher, who was in charge in of the kids, and instruction. I’m not sure who that person reported to or who came up with the program. They were not my regular teacher for any given grade.

No, the elementary school I went to had this program called Learning Lab for K-3 grade. I didn’t even tell my parents what was going on at the time because I assumed they just somehow knew everything that happened at school without me telling them.

I wouldn’t be too hard on him. I was a weird kid who grew up into a weird adult. I ended up doing lots of tests as a kid with him or researchers just like him. I did the test where you’re told to electrocute a person if they answer a question wrong and they pretend to scream. And the test where they use a wire to knock over water bottles. I gave weird responses to those tests as well. I just started pressing the button for the electrocution and laughing. I apologized after. And when the water bottles got knocked over I just sat there and waited for him to come back. It occurred to me that I might get in trouble, but then I figured he would just take my word on it. I was like, “Your structure fell over!”. These tests make for fun stories.

edit: With the electrocution test I definitely tried to reason with the researcher that electrocuting people wasn’t scientific, but I very quickly realized he wasn’t going to listen to me. I realized it was an opportunity to electrocute a person and that I was never getting another opportunity to do that ever, so I just went for it. Egg on my face when it turns out it’s both not real and I’m a awful person. I did feel bad though.