The premise of representative democracy is that we have leaders who are tracking the issues that are important to their constitutents, and making the best decisions for them because those constituents don’t have time or inclination to understand those issues and make their own decisions.
This is incredible. On a scale of 0-10 WTFs this is a 10.
This one is simple: people are (with good justification and for good reason) upset that the US is abandoning its Afghan allies, and (with good justification and for good reason) expect them to be torture-slaughtered as soon as the US military is no longer there to protect them.
I’m referring, of course, to humans.
Whoever came up with that stupid, cruel, “boil a frog slowly” story? It’s wrong at many levels.
I used to enjoy Mehdi Hasan’s work at The Intercept. He’s incredibly articulate, he does his research and all that thinky stuff, and he does not tolerate “both sides”-ism or bullshit. He’s climbing his way up the ladder of the media heirarchy, so he’s moved on from The Intercept to his own show on MSNBC.
What he’s doing is a bit more important than comedy. In my opinion he’s a better version of John Stewart, who was sometimes distractingly funny. Oliver, unlike Stewart, has never managed to get Tucker Carlson even the least bit cancelled, whereas Stewart went into the belly of the beast and revealed him to be such a helpless hack that Crossfire was, actually, cancelled. Oliver’s funny, to be sure, but I worry that he’s mostly funny to my demographic: nerdy ageing white guys.
From the “lesser of two evils” department, we have Joe Biden’s deep thoughts about Israel’s crimes against humanity.
The US wants to pretend to be a good broker, regarding Israel, while simultaneously offering unilateral and complete support. That’s a bad look when Israel is committing crimes against humanity.
This tidbit was on Al Jazeera but not the New York Times. We live in a high level of propaganda.
If you read the Failing New York Times‘ coverage of the Israeli bombing Gaza, it sounds like it’s all just something that kind of … happened. Nobody attacked a mosque full of Palestinians and injured over 170, firing rubber-covered steel bullets into the mosque, you know, the bullets were just flying through the air when they happened to hit some people. And some airplanes happened to be flying over dropping bombs, etc.