Discover Top Posts Tagged with #administration principles population-based

is it true that israel made offers to palestine for a palestinian state and palestinians turned it down? why?

Yes, that's true, the Palestinians were offered a state many times. Here are just some of them:

This is a genuine question, I want to understand your perspective:

The residents of the Falklands/Malvinas themselves overwhelmingly want to remain in the UK, as shown by the 2013 poll, so what would be the point in Argentina taking them over? Who is the beneficiary here?

obviously i think self-determination is important--i think it is much more important than concepts like 'territorial sovereignty' or litigating the legitimacy of centuries old national claims -- and if it were in fact just a matter of some guys living on a rock in the sea who would prefer for their passports to say 'UK' instead of 'Argentina' i would agree that their wishes should be respected. but the UK's control over the malvinas isn't neutral or innocuous--they have 1,300-1,700 military personnel on the islands with air force and naval facilities (this is just over one british soldier for every three actual inhabitants of the falklands!)

additionally, the islands are being used as the base for extremely lucrative oil drilling, which i think is impossible to interpret as anything other than another entry in the long long history of european colonial plunder of the natural resources of south america. so ultimately, i think self-determination is important, but the malvinas/falklands are clearly a case in which the principle of self-determination is being cynically exploited by the UK to maintain a military and economic/industrial presence in south america drastically out of proportion with the tiny population of the islands.

i think any realistic solution would have to involve some kind of joint administration and the ability for the current inhabitants to keep whatever citizenship they want--but the way that national sovereignty works in the world on a de facto level means that 'the people on the islands want to be british' comes packaged with 'and therefore the uk can keep a proportionally enormous military force there and claim exclusive oil rights off argentina's coast' and i think that package is overall a net negative & an enabler of british neoimperialism

#ask #deaths-accountant

The Myth of Transition Regret: Why Rare Cases Shouldn't Drive Trans Health Policy

I an article in Transgender Health Arjee Javellana Restar (photo), Kristi Gamare and Don Operario argue that recent political attention on "transition regret," treatment discontinuation, and detransition is misleading and out of proportion to the actual evidence.

Under the Trump administration, U.S. federal agencies have begun prioritizing research funding for these topics, framing them as major concerns in transgender health.

However, the authors show that regret after gender‑affirming care is extremely rare. Systematic reviews consistently find regret rates below 1%, and population‑level data suggest the true rate may be closer to one in a million people.

Because these outcomes are so uncommon, the authors argue that focusing research resources on them creates serious methodological problems. Studying extremely rare events requires huge sample sizes and often produces unreliable or easily misinterpreted results.

More importantly, this political focus diverts funding away from well‑documented health disparities that affect far larger portions of transgender communities - such as discrimination, barriers to care, mental‑health stressors, and socioeconomic inequities.

"Clarifying the Less than 1%: The False Alarm of Transition Regret, Discontinuation, and Detransition"

Abstract: Recent U.S. government directives under the Trump administration have prioritized funding research on regret and detransition following gender-affirming care. Empirical evidence demonstrates that regret following gender-affirming care is exceedingly rare, occurring in less than 1% of recipients according to systematic reviews—with epidemiological evidence estimating approximately 1 in 1 million people. This disproportionate research focus violates health equity principles by diverting resources from well-documented health disparities affecting larger segments of transgender and nonbinary (trans) populations. Studying such rare outcomes also presents extremely significant methodological challenges. We argue that epidemiological-based research priorities, rather than ideologically driven agenda should inform trans health.

#transgender #trans #lgbt #lgbtqa #queer #detransitioning #health #politics

Preserving America from Trump's Appointments (updated)

(Note to readers: I wrote this two weeks ago, on 15 November. This update accounts for things I have learned since, and for Trump’s further appointments, who confirm the thesis.)

Each of Trump's proposed appointments is a surprise. It is comforting to think that he is simply a vengeful old man, lashing out this way and that. This is unlikely. He and Musk and Putin have been talking for years. And the whole idea of his campaign was that this time he had a plan.

We should be wary of shock, which excuses inaction. Who could have known? What could I have done? If there is a plan, shock is part of the plan. We have to get through the surprise and the shock to see the design and the risk. We don't have much time. Nor is outrage the point. Of course we are outraged. But our own reactions can distract is from the larger pattern.

The newspapers address the surprise and the shock by investigating each proposed appointment individually. And we need this. With detail comes leverage and power. But clarity must also come, and quickly. Each appointment is part of a larger picture. Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.

In historical context we can see this. There is a history of the modern democratic state. There is also a history of engineered regime change and deliberate state destruction. In both histories, five key zones are health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. These people, with power over these areas of life, can make America impossible to sustain.

The foundation of modern democratic state is a healthy, long-lived population. We lived longer in the twentieth century because of hygiene and vaccinations, pioneered by scientists and physicians and then institutionalized by governments. We treat one another better when we know we have longer lives to lose. Health is not only the central human good; it enables the peaceful interactions we associate with the rule of law and democracy. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, would undo all of this. On his watch, were his ideas implemented, millions of us would die. Knowing that our lives will be shorter, we become nasty and brutish.

A modern democratic state depends upon the rule of law. Before anything else is possible, we have to endorse the principle that we are all governed by law, and that our institutions are grounded in law. This enables a functional government of a specific sort, in which leaders can be regularly replaced by elections. It allows us to live as free individuals, within a set of rules that we can alter together. The rule of law depends on people who believe in the spirit of law. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first proposed attorney general, is the opposite of such a person. It is not just that he flouts law himself, spectacularly and disgustingly. It is that he embodies lawlessness, and can be counted upon to abuse law to pursue Trump's political opponents. The end of the rule of law is an essential component of a regime change. He has been replaced by Pam Bondi, who will evade the sex-crime allegations that seem to have brought Gaetz down. But Bondi is someone who dropped an investigation against Trump when he made an illegal donation to one of her foundations. She also led “lock her up” chants against Hillary Clinton, who had committed no crime. And she participated in a central injustice of contemporary American history, Donald Trump’s Big Lie that he won the election of 2020. She can be expected to lead prosecutions based upon alternative reality.

In a class by himself is Kash Patel, whom Trump would like to see as director of the FBI. This, of course, requires Trump to fire Christopher Wray, whom he himself appointed, and who has three years left to serve. Firing Wray for no reason would be unprecedented and would itself have been an outrage in a more sane time. Giving Patel authority over the national police force is nothing less than a promise of authoritarian rule.

Patel is a narcissitic zealot with zero qualification for such a post, as even hard-right Trump insiders such as Bill Barr have said (“over my dead body” were his words when Trump proposed Patel for a lesser position of authority in 2020). Patel got Trump’s attention for his efforts to denounce the entirely correct proposition that Trump was supported by Russian in 2016. Patel was then one of the most active and outspoken participants in Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-2021. Patel has since become a pitchman for a clothing line as well as pills that, he claims, will detox your body from the harmful effects of vaccinations. Patel said both that he would shut down the FBI and that he would use it to prosecute journalists and people who deny the untrue conspiracy theories in which he believes, and to prosecute people who say true things, such as that Russia supports Donald Trump when he runs for office. Russian trolls have been, understandably, very excited in their support of Patel.

A pattern is emerging: the federal government is to be used only as an instrument of revenge, which means that the law will be subverted as such. Laws that were passed to improve the laws of citizens, meanwhile, will simply not be implemented.

The United States of America exists not only because laws are passed, but because we can expect that these laws will be implemented by civil servants. We might find bureaucracy annoying; its absence, though, is deadly. We cannot take the pollution out of the air ourselves, or build the highways ourselves, our write our Social Security checks ourselves. Without a civil service, the law becomes mere paper, and all that works is the personal connection to the government, which the oligarchs will have, and which the rest of us will not. This is the engineered helplessness promised by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are to head a black hole named after a cryptocurrency. There are already oversight instruments in government. DOGE is something entirely different: an agency of destruction, run by people who believe that government should exist for the wealthy or not at all.

The understandable jokes are that DOGE just adds unelected bureaucrats when it is supposed to replace them, and that DOGE is itself a model of inefficiency, since it has two incompetent directors. But the humor distracts from the basic truth: DOGE is there to make the government fail, and then to divide the profitable bits among regime-proximate oligarchs.

DOGE = Den of Oligarchs Gets Everything.

In a modern democratic state, the armed forces are meant to preserve a healthy, long-lived people from external threats. This principal has been much abused in American practice. But never before Donald Trump have we had a president who has presented the purpose of the armed forces as the oppression of Americans. Trump says that Russia and China are less of a threat than "internal enemies." In American tradition, members of the armed forces swear an oath to the Constitution. Trump has indicated that we would prefer "Hitler's generals," which means a personal oath to himself. Pete Hegseth, Trump's proposed secretary of defense, defends war criminals and displays tattoos associated with white nationalism and Christian nationalism. He is a fundraiser and television personality, with a complicated sexual past and zero experience running an organization. Like Trump, he has no coherent account of how foreign powers might threaten America; if anything, he praises them for sharing his misogyny. His own obsessions with gender lead him to believe that American high officers should be politically purged — a proposition that America’s actual enemies would of course welcome. Hegseth makes perfect sense as the person who would direct American armed forces against American citizens.

In a world of hostile powers, an intelligence service is indispensable. Intelligence can be abused, and certainly has been abused. Yet it is necessary to consider military threats: consider the Biden administration's correct call the Russia was about to invade Ukraine. It is also necessary to counter the attempts by foreign intelligence agencies, which are constant, to harm American society. This often involves disinformation. Tulsi Gabbard, insofar as she is known at all, is known as a spreader of Syrian and Russian disinformation. She visited Syria, where here remarks could only be understood as an endorsement of the atrocities of Assad. She suggested to burn victims that they had not suffered because of Assad and his ally Russia, which was in fact the case. Gabbard has no relevant experience. Were she to become director of national intelligence, as Trump proposes, we would lose the trust of our allies, and lose contact with much of what is happening in the world -- just for starters. We would be vulnerable to all of those who wish to cause us harm. Unsurprisingly, Gabbard is regarded in Russia as “girlfriend,” “superwoman” and a “Putin’s agent.”

In the Soviet theory of regime change, one crucial aspect was control of the power ministries: those associated with defense, the police, and intelligence. Patel, Gabbard, and Hegseth are such shocking suggestions as custodians of American power and law that it is easy to overlook Kristi Noem as Trump’s proposed director of Homeland Security. Noem is regarded positively in Trump’s circles because of a publicity stunt in which she, as governor of South Dakota, effectively privatized her states’s National Guard by accepting a big private donation to send a few of its members to the border with Mexico. The border is, of course, a serious matter, Noem’s combination of spectacle, privatization, and incompetence is more than concerning.

Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective, Trump's proposed appointments -- Kennedy, Jr.; Bondi; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard; Noem -- are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done. These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.

I do not defend the status quo. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Department of Defense and the Food and Drug Administration require reform. But such a reform, of these or other agencies, would have to be guided by people with knowledge and experience, who cared about their country, and who had a vision of improvement. That is simply not what is happening here. We are confronted instead with a group of people who, were they to hold the positions they have been assigned, could bring an end to the United States of America.

It is a mistake to think of these people as flawed. It is not they will do a bad job in their assigned posts. It is that they will do a good job using those assigned posts to destroy our country.

However and by whomever this was organized, the intention of these appointments is clear: to create American horror. Elected officials should see this for what it is. Senators, regardless of party, should understand that the United States Senate will not outlast the United States, insist on voting, and vote accordingly. The Supreme Court of the United States will likely be called upon. Although it is a faint hope, one must venture it anyway: that its justices will understand that the Constitution was not in fact written as the cover story for state destruction. The Supreme Court will also not outlast the United States.

And citizens, regardless of how they voted, need now to check their attitudes. This is no longer a post-electoral moment. It is a pre-catastrophic moment. Trump voters are caught in the notion that Trump must be doing the right thing if Harris voters are upset. But Harris voters are upset now because they love their country. And Harris voters will have to get past the idea that Trump voters should reap what they have sown. Yes, some of them did vote to burn it all down. But if it all burns down, we burn too. It is not easy to speak right now; but if some Republicans wish to, please listen.

Both inside and outside Congress, there will have to be simple defiance, joined with a rhetoric of a better America. And, at moments at least, there will also have to be alliances among Americans who, though they differ on other matters, would like to see their country endure.

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I’m actually like foaming at the mouth for your legion posts.

Could you dive more into some legion cities like you mentioned in the women’s role post? I’d like to hear your thoughts on some cities they’d have established’

- ☢️🍑

ah thank you! hyperfixation is ruining my academic life but im glad you're enjoying my endless ramblings about fictional fascists.

before i start anything pls note that im not american, and the only knowledge I have of that country is from badly dubbed cowboy movies and fallout. +im taking this map as my reference. idk how true it is, but it's the only one i can find that actually has names on it.

I'm only going to cover two cities bc otherwise this post would be unethically long.

Flagstaff, the capital city!!

i imagine flagstaff as the only city in the legion with a properly structured city plan. the fallout wiki describes caesar as having "established a capital of sorts amid the ruins of flagstaff." ruins. keep that in mind.

the capital of the legion carries roman urban planning principles and also is a city that is built around pre-war ruins. at the heart of flagstaff old world lies: the focal point of political, economic, and social life. this centre is where key buildings stand—antebellum structures repurposed as government bureaus, alongside a grand temple dedicated to mars. next to these is the economic heart of the city: the bazaar. the bazaar is organized around specialized niches, with different sections dedicated to specific trades. alongside it is an ottoman-style merchant inn providing paid shelter for traders arriving from west.

they have a theatre, too. i know it’s out of character, but let me have this.

as the city expands outward from the town square, the zones transition from administrative and commercial to residential and rural ones. the inner city, just beyond the square, is wealthy, mostly housing the families of high ranking officers. while the main trade is at town square. the inner city also has commercial areas such as general stores + communal spaces like bathhouses.

further out is the industrial zone where freeborn working-class citizens live. this zone is mostly workshops like small textile factories. the legion definitely doesn't have large-scale industries, but small, manual production is reasonable enough to assume.

and at the outermost zone are the pastoral settlemets, farmlands, and brahmin ranches. the number of houses is sparse, mostly resembling small mojave towns. this region supplies food and raw materials to the city, yet most of those who live and work here have probably never set foot in the pre-war side of the capital.

Yuma

okay, so i don't know much about real life yuma, and all we're told in the game is that this city has a us military base that folks and merchants scavenge from. i have written a fanfic before (vulpes brainrot) and described this city as "the smallest saddest town in arizona."

yuma is an unremarkable city, very close to the border of NCR, always under the looming threat of becoming an active warzone. it is a harsh, rural place with very few civilian settlements. most of its population consists of legionaries garrisoned there, living beyond the city’s main walls in nomadic military camps, like cottonwood cove.

yuma is a city of funeral, countless soldiers are sent off from there to campaigns in mojave, and they never return. death clings onto this little city. it is in a constant state of mourning. its proximity to the Republic breeds paranoia among the people, sorrow lingers over every home, every camp. yuma is a small city, a sad city.

it is caught between the grandeur remnants of old world and the melancholia of a fallen age—like post-roman europe, where people gazed upon ruins, knowing they would never have that greatness again. yuma embodies that same despair. those bases of america, the grand monuments of a power they can't even comprehend is reduced to cattle pastures and people scavenge within the decayed husk of america. yet unlike flagstaff, they do not try to make a city out of the ruins, they only reduce that bygone glory into sources of scrap.

+ my pre-canon decanus vulpes hc is that he was also stationed at this city before the insubordination incident. i want him to be sad

#city planning is fun #disko asks #legionposting #fallout new vegas #fallout #fnv #caesar's legion #heart of flagstaff #text post #.txt

Protesters demonstrate at about 2,000 sites nationwide on day US president holds military parade in Washington

Rachel Leingang, Andrew Gumbel, and Melissa Hellmann at The Guardian:

As tanks and soldiers paraded through the streets of Washington on Saturday, several million people around the country turned out to protest against the excesses of Donald Trump’s administration. The protests, dubbed “No Kings”, took place at about 2,100 sites nationwide, from big cities to small towns. A coalition of more than 100 groups joined together to plan the protests, which are committed to a principle of nonviolence.

This week, Trump has deployed national guard and US marine troops to Los Angeles to crack down on protesters who have demonstrated against his ramped-up deportations, defying state and local authorities in a show of military force that hasn’t been seen in the US since the civil rights era. Interest in the Saturday protests rose as a result, organizers said, including at a site near Trump’s south Florida Mar-a-Lago estate.

No Kings organizers estimated the day’s events drew millions of people, with some hundreds still under way in all 50 states and to some cities abroad. These included over 200,000 in New York and over 100,000 in Philadelphia, plus some small towns with sizable crowds for their populations, including the town of Pentwater, Michigan, which saw 400 people join the protest in their 800-person town, the No Kings coalition said. The protests were largely peaceful, though some – in Los Angeles and Portland – were later deemed unlawful assembly by law enforcement and met with teargas.

The tenor of the day was also marked by political violence. There were two early morning shootings of two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, one of whom was killed along with her husband, in what local officials called a politically motivated attack. The state’s police and governor cautioned people to not attend demonstrations across the state “out of an abundance of caution”. Many thousands of people still turned up at the main protest in Minnesota, at the state capitol, to make it clear that political violence wouldn’t silence them. Crowds stretched for blocks as people carried signs against Trump, and some that mentioned the names of the lawmakers who were shot. On the main stage, organizers mentioned the tragedy, saying how it strengthened their resolve and underscored the importance of gathering together.

[...] In some Republican-led states, governors had pre-emptively signaled that law enforcement would quell any protests that they deemed violent.

Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, deployed his state’s national guard to manage protests ahead of No Kings and amid ongoing demonstrations against Trump’s immigration agenda. In Florida, Republican governor Ron DeSantis said that people could legally run over protesters with their cars if they were surrounded. “You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets. You have a right to defend yourself in Florida,” he said. Although most protests went without incident, some saw threats and safety issues.

The No Kings protests at Georgia’s capitol unfolded without police confronting demonstrators, but police dispersed a protest with smoke and teargas in a suburban neighborhood that is home to a high concentration of Hispanic residents. [...] The coalition did not hold a protest in Washington DC – an intentional choice to draw contrast with the military parade and to not give the president an excuse to crack down on peaceful protest. But a DC-based organization hosted a “DC Joy Day” in the district that will “celebrate DC’s people, culture, and our connections to one another”. A separate group of about 300, organized by Refuse Fascism, marched to the White House to protest. Army veteran Chris Yeazel was among the protesters and said he came out in reaction to Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles, and his speech to army soldiers at Fort Bragg, which has been criticized for its partisan tone. “This is the nation’s capital,” Yeazel said. “This is exactly where we need to protest.”

Yesterday, in cities across America red, purple, and blue alike, millions of Americans fed up with the Trump Regime’s tyrannical rule went to show up to oppose Tyrant 47’s destruction of constitutional rule. #NoKings

See Also:

AP, via HuffPost: 'No Kings' Protests: Massive Crowds Around The Nation Demonstrate Against Trump

#No Kings Protests #Protests #No Kings #Trump Regime #Military Parade

CNN 4/28/2025

Tested by Trump’s first 100 days, Democrats take stock of lessons learned for fights ahead

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, Arlette Saenz and Fredreka Schouten, CNN

Updated: 3:35 PM EDT, Mon April 28, 2025

Source: CNN

The good news, say Democratic leaders and top party strategists wrapping their heads around what Donald Trump’s next 45 months will mean, is that there is no shortage of actual impacts to talk about – and that’s before the market turmoil has had the effect on prices or jobs that they expect.

The bad news, they say: the speed and thoroughness out of the White House keeps scrambling their already frantic efforts to fight back.

Every bad Trump poll number has top Democratic operatives and officials wondering if they’re actually seeing the country start to move their way again or if they’re just talking themselves into seeing that.

It’s what Illinois Rep. Sean Casten, first elected in the anti-Trump wave of 2018, calls a progression from apathy to fear to anger to action.

Now: “I think we’re moving from incoherent to directed anger,” Casten said, then added his own stage direction: “He says, optimistically.”

Beyond the arguments in private meetings or posts ripping into each other online, often odd and unexpected alliances within the Democratic Party have been hammering out ideas and tactics over group texts and quiet phone calls. Not having agreed on leaders or set organizing principles have come at a cost. Post-election promises of really digging into the data to figure out what went wrong have faded, but Democrats have started to actually rethink both what they’re saying and how they’re saying it in ways that go far beyond spats over wording or insisting that they should all do more podcasts.

“If you think it’s survivable if you just wait it out, you’re just waiting,” said Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who followed up being picked for the Democrats’ official response to Trump’s address to the joint session of Congress last month by starting a series of speeches aimed at laying out her own vision for what her party’s political argument should be. “If you think he’s doing things to our democracy that we can’t come back from, then you’re moving in a much more panicked way.”

“So many people are predisposed to believe that Trump’s second term is as incompetent as his first term. It’s hard to believe that Trump’s team is more competent than it was in the first term even though Trump himself sounds less coherent,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy.

Murphy said that adjusting his own approach to get more people to see this Trump administration as a threat has meant going long form – extended threads of posts on social media, explainer videos, speeches built around connecting the dots like the one he gave at a town hall in a North Carolina House district represented by a Republican.

None of that, Murphy acknowledged, is an answer or even a plan to get to an answer. Still, he says he at least thinks the country is getting primed for the deeper political reconsideration that needs to happen as he balances his own more institutional Democratic politics with urging colleagues not to write off independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as “fringe” and instead see Sanders’ populism as “the crossover message that could potentially cut into Trump’s base.”

“I don’t think necessarily people know what to do given that the level of peril is so high, but at least we’re not arguing anymore whether something insidious going on,” Murphy said.

Trying to break through despite having no actual power in Washington, Democrats have fanned out in person and online, with events like Sunday’s live streamed sit-in on the Capitol steps to call out specific impacts from the proposed Republican budget led by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Jeffries kicked things off by quoting Ulysses S. Grant’s writing, “There are but two parties in America right now: patriots and traitors.”

With the midterms still a year and a half away, Democrats looking for actual action are hoping not just for wins in courts, but for the Trump administration to abide by losing. On Wednesday, 12 states with Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration for “illegally imposing” tax hikes on Americans through tariffs, following a separate lawsuit challenging the president’s tariffs from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta.

“This is going to be a marathon. We know that,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, who was part of the tariff lawsuit filed last week. “We know that we’ve got a four-year period that we have to cover here to make sure that our country can survive this absolutely lawless presidency, and someone who, I would argue, is trying to carry out a coup on our country.”

Mayes is one of 23 Democratic attorneys general, a group that holds nearly daily virtual meetings to coordinate their work, discussing what they know about Trump’s actions and determining whether they have legal standing to pursue a lawsuit. “The secret sauce for us has been the fact that we are working together as attorneys general,” she said.

Many state attorneys general, including Mayes, have been holding their own town halls.

“We have to win in the courts to prevent these unconstitutional actions from going into place,” said Mayes, who is up for reelection next year in a battleground state Trump won. “But second, we have to win hearts and minds.”

Democrats hope to rekindle faith in government — and Democrats

Well outside of Washington in a state that is deep blue but in November showed significant erosion to Trump in the kinds of places Democrats never assumed they would have any trouble, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey as been strategizing with other governors behind the scenes, but leaving most of the nationalized political pushback against Trump to others.

Healey’s days have become responsive to the White House now that building materials now entangled by tariffs are holding up her own housing agenda; the universities and hospitals in her state dealing with research cuts; and business executives are already seeing orders cut and potential layoffs from supply chain worries.

In a roundabout way, she said those efforts have opened more people up to what Democrats can do in government by giving the party concrete examples of what they’re doing to push back. But a lot of what Healey said she is doing is also just consoling those around her. She said a woman with multiple sclerosis came up to her at event where she was planting trees with a Girl Scouts troop, crying about the disease research that has been shut down.

“It’s why I’ve been fighting the president on this,” Healey recalled saying.

Unable to provide any actual solutions, Healey gave the woman a hug.

Sometimes, Healey said, just showing compassion helps.

“This is not a hypothetical. People have felt real pain already,” Healey said.

That kind of going local, said Rep. Pat Ryan, is how he’s been approaching outreach in his upstate New York district where he ran double digits ahead of former Vice President Kamala Harris and won another term last year. From food banks to veterans’ medical centers, he has convened events where he speaks for just a few minutes before turning over the microphone to constituents talking about the effects on their lives and businesses, as often as he can also including Republican local officials caught between staying true to Trump and speaking out against impacts they hate too.

“The awareness of the harm because of the playbook we’ve been running — not talking about national numbers, but being local, specific and tangible and focusing on harms that have been inflicted, not things that are hypothetical, that’s really on scale broken through,” Ryan said.

Campaign hopes stir

Democrats grasping for good news found some in the state supreme court race they won in Wisconsin and the state senate seats they flipped in Iowa and Pennsylvania.

That’s a sign of more to come, they argue.

“At the beginning of the Trump administration, a lot of Democrats viewed Trump as a popular president that they needed to find ways to work around,” said Wisconsin state Democratic chair Ben Wikler. “The reality is he was always on a trajectory to break so many things and infuriate so many people that he would become a profoundly unpopular president.”

Run for Something – a group focused on recruiting and training young progressives for state and local elections – has had 40,000 people since November sign up expressing interest in running for office, said Amanda Litman, the group’s co-founder and president.

“These are folks who are looking around and seeing that if no one is going to fight for them, they have to fight for themselves,” said Litman. “They are willing to put their careers on hold or change their lives to ultimately make a difference in their community.”

Litman said she will soon launch an initiative focused on the second 100 days of the Trump administration and is encouraging candidates to talk about their anger with the president’s action in personalized ways for their communities.

Newbies aren’t the only ones feeling inspired. Doug Jones, who won a 2017 special election for a Senate seat in Alabama and then lost it by 20 points in 2020, told CNN even he’s thinking about another run.

“I’ve said all along, sooner or later, some of this is going to start catching up to Republicans in Alabama,” Jones said.

“Would it be a tough slog?” Jones said. “Absolutely. But the way things are going right now, you can never tell where that lightning might strike.”

Strength and stress with donors

Signs of grassroots donor energy for Democrats abound. ActBlue, the main online fundraising platform for Democratic candidates and causes, had a record quarter, taking in more than $400 million across all its candidates’ accounts between January and March 31, the organization said. And New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised a staggering $9.6 million in the first three months of the year as she toured the country with Sanders on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.

But at the same time that Republicans are moving to change voting procedures in ways that would likely complicate elections for Democrats, the administration has specifically targeted that fundraising. The president signed a memorandum Thursday essentially directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate ActBlue on claims from GOP-led congressional committees that it enabled fraudulent contributions. This prompted an outcry that also led to the group’s processing $5.6 million in donations in a single day as news of the move spread. It also has Democratic strategists admitting they’re not at all prepared for what happens next.

No immediate fallback is in place, which a number of Democratic operatives say should already be a priority.

The party’s biggest donors have other issues. One Democratic strategist who has served as a philanthropic adviser to billionaires said radical action is needed to confront the threat posed by Trump and his administration’s actions. Democrats, the person said, should concentrate on mounting resistance to Trump at the state level – given the president’s demonstrated disdain for Congress and the courts.

“He’s made it very clear: He doesn’t care what the other two branches say, and the other branches don’t have guns,” said the person, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “He has lots of guns.”

Other donors declined requests for comment about what they’re doing to help the party. Several have also turned down entreaties from Democratic leaders, claiming either that they’re unhappy with the party or too scared themselves of Trump retribution in ways that are enraging Democratic leaders privately.

Infighting continues

The agonizing churn is feeding outsized attention to spats like the one among Democratic National Committee leaders over vice chair David Hogg’s promise to support primary challenges against incumbents, or the Democratic leader of the Florida state senate leaving the party last week with a floor speech declaring, “our constituents are craving practical leaders, not political hacks.”

Even Slotkin’s series of speeches set off its own day of internal online battle last week when she criticized those using the word “oligarchy,” seemingly prompting an indirect clapback from Ocasio-Cortez, who posted that “plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle feel threatened by rising class consciousness.”

“The times have come for us, and we need to do what the Democratic Party isn’t particularly good at, which is strategic planning and a coordinated message. It’s not that everybody has to say the same thing, but we have to be playing on the same team,” Slotkin said. “Sometimes in moments of desperation, people actually come together and for the sake of the country, for the sake of their communities, get on the same page. That’s what I’m hoping for.”

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I.8.1 Is the Spanish Revolution inapplicable as a model for modern societies?

Quite the reverse. More urban workers took part in the revolution than in the countryside. So while it is true that collectivisation was extensive in rural areas, the revolution also made its mark in urban areas and in industry.

In total, the “regions most affected” by collectivisation “were Catalonia and Aragón, where about 70 per cent of the workforce was involved. The total for the whole of Republican territory was nearly 800,000 on the land and a little more than a million in industry. In Barcelona workers’ committees took over all the services, the oil monopoly, the shipping companies, heavy engineering firms such as Volcano, the Ford motor company, chemical companies, the textile industry and a host of smaller enterprises … Services such as water, gas and electricity were working under new management within hours of the storming of the Atarazanas barracks … a conversion of appropriate factories to war production meant that metallurgical concerns had started to produce armed cars by 22 July … The industrial workers of Catalonia were the most skilled in Spain … One of the most impressive feats of those early days was the resurrection of the public transport system at a time when the streets were still littered and barricaded.” Five days after the fighting had stopped, 700 tramcars rather than the usual 600, all painted in the black-and-red colours of the CNT-FAI, were operating in Barcelona. [Antony Beevor, The Spanish Civil War, pp. 91–2]