KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — In a town that has been through it all and is clawing its way back, a man named Omidullah is looking to hit paydirt.
The Kabul real estate agent is selling a nine-bedroom, nine-bath, white-and-gold villa in the Afghan capital. On the roof’s gable, glittering Arabic script tempts buyers and brokers with the word “mashallah” — “God has willed it.”
The villa is listed at $450,000, a startling number in a country where more than half of the population relies on humanitarian aid to survive, most Afghans don’t have bank accounts, and mortgages are rare. Yet the offers are coming in.
“It’s a myth that Afghans don’t have money,” Omidullah said. “We have very big businessmen who have big businesses abroad. There are houses here worth millions of dollars.”
In Kabul, a curious thing is happening to fuel the high-end real estate market. Peace, it seems, is driving up property prices.
That’s the thing. Our federal legislators seem to come in two flavors: the ideological right-wing people who are actively turning back the clock, and the rhetorical opposition who, by their actions, demonstrate that they only care about money and getting wealthier. It’s an unfortunate combination, and with no legitimate opposition, I foresee two-thirds of the country criminalizing abortion in the coming years, just like how 2/3 of the country still has a $7.25 minimum wage.
But for me, the core principle here is that at the federal level the law is blatantly hostile to women and it’s trending worse and the same is true of the poor. One of the recent SCOTUS decisions even held up the criminalization of homelessness.
It’s wild to me that as of time making this comment I have 12 upvotes and you have -7 and we’re in agreement with each other.
I’m interested to see if the state’s rights crowd is going to go after states like mine for having a constitutional right to abortion. Friends and I have been taking bets on what they’re gonna try. Everyone I know in my state has a “fuck around find out” attitude about if the christofascists try to interfere with us.
Eh, that’s okay. People aren’t really conditioned to think in a nuanced way on Lemmy. (Or any social media platform, really) Mastodon’s pretty good for more nuanced discussions of culture and politics.
I think the anti-abortion enforcement is going to be almost solely electronic in nature, because most people aren’t aware of the extent to which they have opted in for their communications to be spied upon. We’ve already seen a few instances where someone’s Messenger communications have been used to go after them punitively for seeking an abortion. With Idaho criminalizing abortion and getting away with it, it’s just matter of time before every state controlled by conservatives follows suit. In states where it’s permitted, it’s not a stretch to argue that the judicial branch will wipe out those gains in some way.
The silver lining here is that, for all of his promises, Trump’s main focus will be monetizing the presidency. He’s already focused on that, with all the social media posts he’s doing to promote McDonald’s. He’s not doing that shit for free, and there are bazillion different ways to bribe him legally.
Further, historically, nearly every president regardless of their mandate has lost Congress at the mid-terms. It happened to Clinton, Obama, Trump, and Biden. I will be shocked if it doesn’t happen to Trump, and if Congress does go blue, it’s at least going to be procedurally slightly harder to manifest the extremist policies he ran upon.
Yeah. My fear, and I’ve been shouting this from the rooftops since 2001’s patriot act, is that we have the infrastructure in place already to do quite a bit of damage in two years. And look at all the major players in the tech industry - nearly every single one of the big names are fascists. Peter theil, Elon musk, mark zuckerberg… and I’m suspicious as hell of Sam Altman.
Remember, IBM made the Holocaust possible. It was the industrialization of death…