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.
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…