we’re obviously, contextually talking about deaths from heat, not from all the other stuff that happens on Hajj. don’t do this “you cannot be serious” routine when you simultaneously don’t even engage with the context of the question

yes; as far as i’m aware there has never been a mass-death event like this in the contemporary history of the Hajj, although it’s always been arduous and more potentially deadly when it falls during the summer

you may take the United Fruit Company’s name, but you can’t take its legacy of financing terrorism and violence in Latin America…

Massachusetts has collected about $1.8 billion from a voter-approved surtax on the state’s highest earners through the first nine months of the fiscal year, the Department of Revenue said Monday in a quarterly report.

That’s more than $800 million more than what the Legislature and Gov. Maura Healey planned to spend in surtax revenue for all of fiscal year 2024, raising the possibility of a sizable pot that will land in an Education and Transportation Reserve Fund and the Education and Transportation Innovation and Capital Fund, both surtax-specific accounts, once the books close.

ALAMOSA — Over decades starting in 1985, the Colorado Mushroom Farm northeast of Alamosa sold millions of pounds of mushrooms grown and harvested within the building’s dimmed cavern to grocery stores in Colorado. Along the way it offered year-round employment to generations of immigrant workers, many of whom came here from Guatemala fleeing civil war and searching for a better economic future.

But when the farm filed for bankruptcy in December 2022, it owed thousands of dollars in unpaid wages to employees, some of whom had been subjected to unsafe working conditions and were injured on the job.

[…]Now, some of those workers are taking charge of their futures with the help of a powerful coalition of nonprofit and government supporters as well as Minsun Ji at the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center, which works to dismantle economic systems that benefit a small few at the expense of many, especially working-class communities and communities of color.

It’s an American Dream in the making, but not without funding for an employee-owned mushroom co-op and the workers learning to navigate the hurdles of business ownership in a system that favors wealthy white entrepreneurs.

always fun after the wolf reintroduction vote from a few years back. here’s why they’re doing this:

Colorado is considered a prime habitat for wolverines, which are listed as a threatened species across the Lower 48 states by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Wolverines were nearly eliminated from much of the United States in the 1930s, experts said, but conservation efforts have helped the animal to make a bit of a comeback. In Colorado, the last confirmed sighting of a wolverine was in 2009, when one traveled down from the Grand Tetons.

Advocates for reintroduction said Colorado is home to the largest block of wolverine-ready habitat in the Lower 48, with about one-fifth of total suitable land. Wolverines are solitary animals that favor high-alpine environments.

in this case: no, they’re just Filipino, and it seems to just be a contraction of Jupiter or something similarly banal. i think it would be prudent in the future to do a bit of double checking before we start accusing people of Nazis; you can easily check your assumption by just visiting their mastodon page, linked in the description of their kbin account.

if it can happen in the South, it can happen in your workplace too! you should start a union–and if you need help to that end, reach out to the AFL-CIO or, if you would prefer a more radical alternative, EWOC

this is actually quite cute, i think.

i don’t think “adding race-specific stripes to a pride flag” is a bad thing, is “treating people differently based on skin tone” except in the most cringeworthy, pedantic, I See No Color way possible, or is “racist”—and i think that if you believe these things you probably will not be allowed to partake in discussions like this on our instance after today

this is not news and it’s not US news; don’t make a post like this in this section

also in Israel news today is this–the probable shutting down of Al Jazeera’s operations there. Netanyahu says he’ll act swiftly to request the outlet be banned under this new law

the strategy here appears to be that Israel is trying to bait Hezbollah into attacking them, which is a very sane strategy and not at all completely psychotic

Otherwise you could claim a crossdresser were trans or people who claimed they were “attack helicopters” would have to be accepted as trans because there would literally be no argument you could make against it.

this just sounds like a skill issue on your part, i’m sorry–this is not an issue if you have a postmodernist understanding of gender, which most trans people (myself included) subscribe to.

at the end of the day when you drill down? there really is not a material difference between the “real” and “fake” genders–gender is entirely socially constructed, and the designations of “male” and “female” that most people fall into are as arbitrary as any xenogender (real or frivolously created by right-wingers). you only “lose” by entertaining frivolous designations if your understanding of gender is already so narrow that you can’t conceptually accommodate anything beyond a handful of stock gender identities to begin with.

without reducing them each as persons into cartoon villains in my mind

if you “reduced them to cartoon villains” they would literally be less evil than they actually are. Republicans writ large would gladly kill billions of people if it kept the fossil fuel money going—and we know this because they are actively choosing to do that by denying climate change and making it as difficult as possible to move away from fossil fuels as we speak

Not one person on Earth would raid the capital building for Jeb Bush.

people literally did this to disrupt the 2000 recount in Florida on behalf of George W. Bush, Jeb’s careerist failbrother. you cannot seriously think this is only a populist thing

As much as they’d like to deny it, they are responsible for the rise of Trump and extremism.

reducing voters to brainless automata who have no agency in the rise of fascism is a good way to completely neuter your ability to actually combat fascism because many Americans are active participants to the project of building fascism, not idly going along because of partisan voting. bluntly: if fascism had no base, elevating it wouldn’t work in the first place

I have no doubt that many republicans would abolish democracy in a heartbeat if they themselves could, without risk, become the autarch…

but then you’re making my argument even more compelling for why literally none of these people should be trusted and none of them are moderate or should be treated that way (i.e. that it doesn’t matter which one you elect, so the ones who are most open and unelectable should be elevated)–they’re just Fascists In Waiting too; treating them as banal when by your analysis they aren’t would be akin to ignoring your HIV because it hasn’t started blatantly killing you yet

They did break with Trump. They did certify the election.

if your bar for “Republicans demonstrating their desire to overthrow democracy” cannot realistically be met until they actually do that then i think your bar is bad and hopelessly naive, because at that point neither you nor i will live in a democracy and the bar will cease to be relevant.

but even entertaining this bar for some reason: please remind me how many of these people then supported actually prosecuting Trump for extremely unambiguously committing several crimes, including attempting to overthrow the election and inciting a mob that threatened to kill all of Congress.^[1] and let’s then take stock of how many Republicans who feigned shock and gall at the event subsequently act like all that never happened, openly apologize for it, or state they would refuse to hold Trump accountable for/actively support similar criminal actions in 2024. to say nothing of how many state Republican parties (Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona), even pre-Trump, had fallen completely into believing that land should vote and that the only elections which count are ones they win. or how any initiative to ban gerrymandering or to abolish the undemocratic Electoral College is Democratic-led, because Republicans benefit from their continuation?