It pressures the system in those cities or states, which is actual pressure to the system, just not direct pressure on the federal government. History shows you can mount pressure through local and state changes until it gets overwhelming support on a federal level.

You can make the argument there might be more effective or quicker solutions, but this is unquestionably one path toward it.

Then Putin should be very scared of that risk and withdraw immediately!

He should, but he doesn’t appear to be. That puts the ball in everybody else’s court, unfair though it is.

Or the Russian people should be scared of that and force him to withdraw.

Who am I kidding, the Russian people can’t stand up to President Putin, they’re too busy listening to General Stolichnaya.

A large number of Russians are trying to protest. They typically get killed or imprisoned. It’s hard to fault the remainder for not risking their lives for a probably fruitless attempt at dissent.

He will run out of people, at the expense of both Russian human beings and Ukrainian human beings. That’s the best case scenario with continued war, assuming it doesn’t escalate to directly include other countries.

That’s not mutually exclusive with what I said.

This has the possible side effect of nuclear war.

Pretty much everybody’s the bad guy here, tbh. Sort of a Lybia-during-Gaddafi situation - he was horrible, but it’s not like they’ve been in a great place since.

Agreed, but that’s not happening. It’s wild that the only possible options anybody sees right now are all-out war or Putin suddenly having a change of heart, and anybody who considers there might be other avenues to pursue is ridiculous.

Fine, the war goes on, and we’ll see hundreds of thousands of people continue to die. Nothing else anybody in the entire world can do, it all rests on Putin changing his mind, and we’ll just have to wait it out. Sucks to suck for all of those people, their families, and their descendants who are going to grow up in a country that’s going to take generations to rebuild.

How Parking Garages Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

How Public Parks Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

How the Street Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

How Literal Playgrounds Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

Maybe if these things are happening everywhere, it’s not the app that’s the issue. This kind of talk opens us up to bans on Signal and similar apps, and that’s just unacceptable. Address the core issues in society, don’t try (and typically fail) to bandage it by taking away more and more of people’s rights and freedoms.

They said the same thing when he was repeatedly lining up troops along Ukraine’s border.

It’s not a problem until it is. They need to be making more progress on peace talks. It’s unacceptable this war has gone on for this long and killed this many people.

I don’t think they’ve released the text nor a comprehensive list of what it includes. They’ve only alluded to a few things, like the occupation.

This AP article says as much when it says, “Blinken, who is back in the region this week, said Monday that Israel had agreed to the proposal without saying what it entails.” https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2024/why-is-israel-demanding-control-over-2-gaza-corridors-in-the-cease-fire-talks/

Al-Jazeera and similar have all said some variation of that as far as I’ve seen.

On first read, it gives an understanding that both sides are willing to approach a deal - but lack trust in the process and the mediators ability to coerce the other side to actually commit and follow through.

I don’t think this is a bad reading of the article in vacuum, but I don’t think it’s a fair reading of the situation because AP intentionally or unintentionally has left quite a bit out. Hamas agreed to a US-backed ceasefire back in May that Israel refused. There was plenty of trust on both sides that they’d get what was in the deal, but Israel didn’t want that particular deal at that particular time.

What’s happening now is Hamas wants Israel to remove their troops and generally stop killing Palestinians, in addition to the other parts of the deal. Israel refuses to put this in writing, saying they’ll stop killing people for now, but they’re going to leave troops behind to occupy the area - but eventually they’ll remove those troops. You’re right that Hamas doesn’t trust Israel’s going to remove those troops, and I think that’s entirely reasonable given how the “bridging proposal” is a variation of May’s proposal, but striking out things like withdrawing troops. Seems like if that’s those are the major changes they’re making to the written proposal, they probably don’t plan on following through.

But it’s also entirely unreasonable for Israel to strike that in the first place. The Palestinians don’t want Israel to be an occupying force. There’s nothing they can do about the civilians continuing to settle and take their land, but at the very least they’re asking for the additional soldiers that have invaded the land in the last year to get out while they’re not actively killing Palestinians.

On top of that, Israel’s occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor and Rafah crossing is in violation of the Camp David agreements with Egypt. It’s really difficult to trust you can make a deal with somebody who’s currently not following the agreement they have with your mediator.

This is a helpful article that explains the original deal in more detail than most people want to know: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/6/text-of-the-ceasefire-proposal-approved-by-hamas

It’s been 318 days since October 7, 2023, and a very rough estimate is around 40,000 fatalities, mostly civilians. On average, that’s 126 dead per day since Israel started this attack. So 35 dead is actually a pretty merciful day.

tax of 1.7% to 3.5% to the richest 0.5% of the country’s households

We could try something more like a 95% wealth tax and really fix some problems.