Newspaper Headlines That Make You Want to Give Up on Life

Alabama: pregnant woman shot in stomach is charged in fetus's death

I have been reading the accounts provided by Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib on the treatment of detained migrants in these detention facilities (camps). I have been desensitized to a lot of suffering, which is an unfortunate consequence of living in this world of almost universal Internet access, but this has really gotten to me. I felt sick reading them this morning. It's amazing (incredibly frightening) that none of this would have received any mainstream coverage if not for the actions of a few relatively rogue, freshmen Congresswomen..

A little Noam for July 4!

https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-trump-is-consolidating-far-right-power-globally/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/go-media-tells-deadspin-staff-in-leaked-memo-stick-to-sports?ref=scroll

This situation at Deadspin is kind of nuts. Drew Magary and David Roth have been dragging their asses on Twitter today and they posted the email address today that is basically the distro list for all the decision makers associated with this.

'He is our O.J.'
POLITICO readers explain why they’re standing with Trump during impeachment.



https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/01/09/trump-support-impeachment-096606

https://twitter.com/NBCPhiladelphia/status/1309161848277790729/photo/1

https://www.axios.com/florida-covid-response-reopening-ron-desantis-0b432cf6-a6ba-41cf-82c0-0148158581cf.html

Need a reminder that we will be living in our corporate news media hell for the rest of our lives? Look no further than anything Axios publishes, where you get brilliant analysis like:

Axios wrote:The closer you are to either loss or to the fullness of life will likely determine how you feel about the state's response.

Basically, unless you know someone who died of COVID you're probably thrilled with Florida's COVID response.

Pack it in, folks. Things aren't getting better.

Only the dead can save us now

I will be in Florida end of next week and will report back on the destruction DeSantis has brought down.

I'm sure it doesn't look that bad because most people with middle to upper-middle class resources are fine.

It's simply worth noting that we have created a society where a large plurality of people openly said, "let's cull the oldest and least fit among us in the name of continued economic growth" and implicitly everyone said, "sure".

And that was explicitly stated by members of Rahm Emanuel's consulting class family, fwiw.

Ron DeSanctis will be running for president on the platform of "condemning a massive number of seniors and working-class people to their death was worth it for 1.25% GPD growth" and will be incredibly successful with that.

The underclass has literally been erased from public consciousness. Get used to it.

The underclass has been absent from the public sphere and political debate in this country for a very long time though. If anything, secular stagnation in the advanced industrial economies of the Global North have led to a political reemergence of the underclass (gilet jaunes, Corbynism, Sanders & DSA, etc.) Here is a good example in Italy:

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/05/898893067/in-italy-a-migrants-advocate-fights-for-the-invisibles

He is probably one of the most important political voices right now on the entire European continent. He doesn't just speak on behalf of African migrant laborers in the agricultural fields of southern Italy. He is a trade unionist. He has gone on hunger strikes outside of the Italian Parliament in defense of workers' right to organize, which not only includes migrants but also a whole class of native-born Italians trapped in a precarious gig economy of zero-hour contracts. Just today he announced that the social movement is going to launch into a political party that will seek electoral office because change requires more than just protest actions. I don't expect it to fundamentally transform Italian politics anytime soon (although nobody though M5S would blossom so quickly into the single largest party in Parliament either).

There is always going to be resistance. Our collective project is to transform that resistance into a political project.

These two mass shootings are a really good reminder that our old social normal actually fucking sucked and was totally rotten. As though we needed reminding of that... Really upsetting. My younger sister lives about 15 minutes away from the shooting that took place today. Such is a public school teach now as well so these kinds of events are really scary and weird to think about. Really, really frustrating.

Is it just me or has 90% of the reporting on this story (as of the time I made this post) been "brave police officer killed in the line of duty while saving dozens of people" and not "ten innocent people killed by man with a murder weapon"?

Maybe there are reasonable explanations for this, maybe there's still very little else that can actually be released to the public yet and this is really the only for-sure thing that actually can be reported at this point, victims' families still need to be notified, they might not even have a motive let alone an ID on the killer, etc.

But man,

Headline from The Guardian:

Israel/Ben & Jerry’s sales ban will have ‘serious consequences’, says PM

It was the most predictable thing in the world that both of these variants (Delta in India and now Omicron in South Africa) would come from two of the more densely populated and industrialized nations in the Global South that are being denied sufficient access to vaccines because of the incredible greed of multinational pharmaceutical companies and the complicity of the EU and United States. This is literally exactly what intelligent and informed people were saying would happen in March of 2020 when we first entered the pandemic.

Thankfully it seems like the Omicron variant is no more lethal only more virulent and contagious. It seems like Covid has, at least thus far, mutated to become more like a common cold than something worse. And that's probably what will happen for a period of several years. At least, that is all we can really hope for at this point. The alternative option of a coordinated international response that puts global public health over the shareholder value of Pfizer is apparently utopian.

It's really something else. My roommate is a 34-year-old Indian who worked as an adviser for the national parliament. His wife has lost so many friends to the delta variant. He got Covid over the summer and was hospitalized and began to worry about his life. He was telling me stories about the eastern provinces of Uttar-Pradesh where families were no longer able to afford the price of wood because of shortages in the market so they had to just throw their loved ones in rivers or bury them (which goes against their religion). His friends who were administrators in those provinces told him stories about the government working to hide piles of dead bodies from the public in order to avoid a total public relations disaster.

So yeah, that is the world we live in. But it's cool because the liberal hero Angela Merkel said no to racism that one time in like 2015 or something so yeah she is probably right that waiving the patents would destabilize markets and global supply chains and we should just accept this loss of life as an inevitability. Also people criticizing her and Queen Ursula are probably just misogynistic pigs.

https://www.shawlocal.com/northwest-herald/news/local/2021/12/29/mr-as-italian-beef-closing-after-54-years-in-crystal-lake/

Not an area I've found myself in much so I don't know the place, but I know how serious it is when a beloved beef place closes. RPI.

Scrolling through news sites on a Sunday morning and several have either as the lead headline or above the fold stories on Trump or January 6 investigations. There is nothing else going on in the world? Like JFC move on people.

I mean, the president tries to overthrow the government one time and now it's all anyone can talk about.

Yea it’s like these folks have figured out clicks matter more than anything and Donnie can sure drive those clicks. But yes, that other stuff matters deeply to them as well.

“Move on” would be much better advice if that treasonous fucking criminal were in prison, but yeah I’m burned out too I guess.

Both perspectives are two sides of the same coin.

In any just society, Donald Trump would be executed for his actions as president. The fact that he's essentially as popular as ever and near-immune from prosecution is a fundamental indictment of our institutions and speaks to the gross incentives of the ruling class.

The fact that politicians and news shows talk about doing something while making no effort to either make the case to voters that something should be done OR use the levers of power to actually do something is embarrassing. That's why people feel we should "move on", since we know it's all posturing.

We understand how and why Republicans will stonewall inquiries and lie under oath and drag out investigations as long as possible in the name of building a narrative that anyone who is investigating them is "desperate" and just won't "let it go."

Yet the prevailing wisdom now, especially among the Most Rational Adults In The Room, is that we need to just forget all of this and move on. I guess because it's literally impossible to run an investigation and do anything else at the same time?

idk it just seems like this is exactly how they want it to go down? This is also our last chance to do literally anything at all about known crimes before they seize control in a year and get carte blanche for everything forever