When those in power constantly lied about the little things, it isn't hard to see why people have tuned out--and even questioned whether masks were even effective against the virus.

This infuriates me as much as those “5th grade classroom rallies to sell pencils so their teacher can have life-saving surgery.”

Fuck you, America.

Well while some are talking about removing lgbt protection rulings, we are now in full mask off mode.

They are not just coming for lgbt people after going after people who can give birth, they’re going after black people too.

For half a year, “israel” has murdered and maimed the people of Gaza with a weapons arsenal that is 68% supplied by the U.S.A." from Writers Against the War on Gaza, 15/Apr/2024:

caption continued under video

The war criminal Netanyahu has called the IOF the world’s “most moral army” — this three minute video demos the reality. Our officials could spend billions to secure their constituents affordable housing, healthcare, and education.

Instead, they are funneling blood money to the zionist genocidaires, who have spent the past six months engineering famine in northern Gaza and sending entire neighborhoods up in flames. In the words of Aaron Bushnell, “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

The filmmaker said, “As a Palestinian American, whenever someone speaks to me of Israel, this is what I see. A soulless, murderous, racist, brainwashed society that delights in murdering my people. I spent countless hours sorting through this nightmarish imagery posted by Israelis—and gathered by other Palestinians, allies, and journalists—so that whenever someone speaks to you of Israel, this is what you’ll see too.”

Embargo “israel” now.

The sex-based apartheid against women in Afghanistan cannot be reduced to, "Afghan men saw Afghan women enjoying freedom and got mad, so they established extremist religious governments to stop it." I am really tired of seeing this misconception and oversimplification spread around by leftists, liberals and feminists – it's racist, and simply not fucking true.

The majority of Afghans want a secular government and for the oppression of women to end. The Taliban represent a minority of Afghanistan's people. The deterioration of Afghan society – in particular, women's rights and freedoms – directly results from decades of foreign intervention, imperialism and occupation. Afghans did not destroy Afghanistan, the United States did, and the USSR paved the way for them to do so.

Had Afghanistan never been treated like a pawn in the games played by imperialistic powers, had we not been reduced to resources, strategic importance and a tool for weakening the enemy, extremism would have never come to power.

An overview of Afghanistan's recent history:

The USSR wanted to incorporate Afghanistan into Soviet Central Asia and did so by sabotaging indigenous Afghan communist movements and replacing our leaders with those loyal to the USSR. The United States began funding and training Islamic extremists – the Mujahideen – to fight against the Soviet influence and subsequent invasion, and to help the CIA suppress any indigenous Afghan leftist movements. Those Mujahideen won the war, and then spent the next decade fighting for absolute control over Afghanistan.

During that time period, known as the Afghan Civil War, the Mujahideen became warlords, each enforcing their own laws on the regions they controlled. Kabul was nearly destroyed, and the chaos, destruction and death was largely ignored by the United States despite being the ones who caused and empowered it. This civil war era created the perfect, unstable environment needed to give a fringe but strong group like the Taliban a chance to rise to power. And after two decades of war, a singular entity taking control and bringing 'peace' was enticing to all Afghans, even if their views were objectively more extreme than what we had been enduring up to that point.

When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they allied with the same warlords that had been destroying our country the decade prior and whom they had rallied against the Soviets – these are the people that made up the Northern Alliance. The 'good guys' that America gave us were rapists, pillagers, and violent extremists, no better than the Taliban. And that's not even mentioning the horrible atrocities and war crimes committed by American forces themselves.

So, no, Afghan men did not collectively wake up one day and decide that women had too much freedom and rush to establish an extremist government overnight. No, this is not to excuse the misogyny of men in our society – the extremists had to already exist for Americans to fund and arm them against the Soviets – but rather to redirect the bulk of this racist blame to the actual culprits. The religious extremism and sex-based apartheid would not be oppressing and murdering us today if they hadn't been funded and supported by the United States of America thirty years ago. And despite all the abuses and restrictions, many Afghan women prefer the Taliban's current government to another American occupation. I felt safer walking in Taliban-controlled Kabul than I did being 'randomly searched' (sexually assaulted) by American military police in my village as a child.

Imperialism is inextricably linked with patriarchal violence and women's oppression. You cannot talk about the deterioration of Afghanistan without talking about the true cause of said decline: The United States of America. Americans of all political views, including leftists and feminists, are guilty of reducing or outright ignoring Western responsibility for female oppression in the Global South, finding it much easier to place all blame on the foreign brown man or our supposedly backwards, savage cultures, when the most responsibility belongs with Western governments and their meddling games that forced the most violent misogynists among us into power.

(Most of this information comes from my own experience living as an Afghan Hazara woman in Afghanistan, but Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence covers this in much more detail. If you want more on the Soviet-Afghan war and Afghanistan's socialist history, Revolutionary Afghanistan is an English-language source from a more leftist perspective)

“Perry why do you keep adding that you are an American Citizen to some posts you respond to or share”

Because I want to make it extremely clear that when I comment on the horrors the US does, there is no mistake an American is trying to pointing them out. That an American has fallen for the same propaganda that allowed those atrocities to occur.

This isn’t someone outside the US criticizing it. This someone in the US, who lives here and works here and pays taxes here is opposed to what I have allowed to occur with my taxes and my voting choices.

I do not absolve myself of the responsibility of the actions my government had done. I am part of the machine that has allowed this to happen. Every tax dollar given is another dollar funding the genocide, and I realize this, and an disgusted by it, and I want you to know that there are Americans not just in the streets, but Americans here who want to spread the word and make people aware of the horrors we allow.

I can never expect forgiveness for the Palestinians, Congolese, Sundanese, Afganis, Iraqis, the Aboriginal to the lands I sleep on, work on, eat on, anyone and everyone we have and continue to allow to die for our machine. That includes the poor we allow to suffer on the streets and the ones that we say should be “happy” they have a roof over their heads as if that makes the other horrors we allow okay.

I can only hope that I don’t burn in the hottest layers of whatever Hell there may be, that I can try to prevent even a single death.

I am an American Citizen. My nation funds genocide. We are a failed state. Please know I am sorry, and won’t stop fighting.

This election is doomed. We can't even get them to stick to their own platform l, they'd rather use the republican one instead.

Bye bitches I’m moving to Iceland

This shit is not okay.

I usually balk at those annoying liberals who blame normal people for red state regression, "this is what you get for voting Republican, this is your fault, I hope you got what you wanted," because 9 times out of 10 it's the politicians who are the problem. They are no longer beholden to a majority (not sure they ever really were), and completely divorced from reality, but sometimes I do have to wonder why normal people love them so much. It's one thing to defend voters in Wisconsin or Texas where things are close to 50-50 and the state legislatures have gerrymandered themselves into a permanent majority regardless of the popular vote, but then you have ethnostates like Idaho and Wyoming that are like >80% Republican and >90% white, and I have to come to terms with the fact that a lot of my countrymen really do want everyone who isn't them to live in squalor. Idaho; no abortions, no traveling out of state for abortions, a lot of hospitals no longer delivering babies because they're afraid of getting sued by the government for imaginary abortions, it's an unlivable hellscape for women, and yet a supermajoroty support the fucking Handmaid's Tale. How can anyone be single issue in today's climate? How can anyone ignore the glaring breaches of freedom just because their representative hates the same people they do? Florida's no better, we're arguably worse, what with the fucking demon we have as a governor, I just don't understand why anyone wants to live like this? How can a party that has controlled the government unopposed for decades shift blame onto the side that has been out of power the whole time? Why is there so much wanton cruelty? Are we really a society of sociopaths who just want to do harm for harm's sake? It's like the people who voted for the Leopards Eating Faces Party have stopped complaining that the leopards are eating their faces and are instead embracing it like it is their civic duty.

"I regret that I have but one face to give for my leopard!"

This is bigger than any one election. He has a heavy hand in killing 40,000 Palestinians in less than 4 months. Voting for Joe Biden is voting for Genocide. In Michigan today, and beyond."

from Khaled Beydoun, 28/Feb/2024:

America is garbage and has now put women in danger. Our country is failing us.