#wsws

As soon as I learned that the Western Society of Weed Science‘s annual meeting was going to be held in Boise in 2023, I began making plans to attend. I had attended the annual meeting in 2018 when it was held in Garden Grove, California and had been thinking about it ever since. It’s not every year that a meeting like this comes to your hometown, so it was an opportunity I knew I couldn’t miss.…

Greece’s conservative New Democracy (ND) government is imposing dictatorial measures using the COVID-19 pandemic as justification. Last week it mounted a huge police mobilisation in the run-up to the November 17 anniversary of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic student uprising against the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974.

Using the pandemic as a pretext, Chief of the Hellenic Police Michalis Karamalakis banned all public gatherings of four or more people between November 15 and November 18, which is the period during which commemoration events traditionally take place.

On November 17, the police deployed 5,000 officers in the capital. Despite the ban, protesters still attended commemorations protests, only to be met with water cannons and tear gas, with the police utilising overhead drones to transmit live footage to police headquarters.

The claim that the right to assembly was banned on public health grounds does not hold water. Cases in Greece have been steadily rising since the summer following the government’s decision to prematurely lift restrictions to kickstart the economy. With no significant resources allocated to counter the dire effects of this reopening, Greece’s advantage of having had relatively few deaths in the first wave of the pandemic—as a result of going into lockdown earlier than other European countries—has now been undone.

Ever since she’d found out that she was pregnant, Rachel kept mostly to herself. No one else knew but Kurt, and she leaned on him during this time. Rachel knew everyone would find out eventually, but for now, she hadn’t started showing yet and she’d hide her baby bump as best as she could when the time came. Who knew? Maybe she’d be gone before then. She obviously couldn’t go on tour anymore this summer. It wouldn’t be good for the baby, but that didn’t mean she needed to stay. Her dads, she knew, would support her in going somewhere new for a fresh start with the baby after they’d gotten over the initial shock. Maybe they’d even come with her.

“You’re going to tell him, right?” Kurt asked her, interrupting her thoughts. She remained silent, her eyes avoiding his. “You have to tell him, Rachel,” he insisted, moving closer to her. “He deserves to know. Even if you two don’t get back together...” “Absolutely not,” she responded abruptly, interrupting Kurt this time. After Sam’s near-death experience, she’d been a mess, but since then, she’d had time to clear her head, and the truth was that Sam had really hurt her. He’d made her think that they still had a chance and then had presented her with divorce papers. Kurt took a breath, treading carefully. “Even if you don’t, you have to let him be there for the baby. You have to give him that choice,” he finished, taking her hand in his. “I know you’ll do the right thing. You always do.”

In the present, a time of social crisis and uncertainty, the first and second Revolutions are the subject of intense controversy. The World Socialist Web Site will be celebrating the 244th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by hosting a discussion with five eminent historians, Victoria Bynum, Clayborne Carson, Richard Carwardine, James Oakes and Gordon Wood. They will assess the Revolutions in the context of their times as well as their national and global consequences. Finally, the discussants will consider the possible implications of contemporary debates over the nature of the Revolutions for the future of the United States and the world.

I'm SO sorry for even posting this because I don't even read WSWS anymore (stopped in 2010 when they decided to defend Roman Polanski) but I, out of curiosity, clicked this because someone I'm friends with was laughing at it and I can't believe the absolute poverty of this kind of orthodox marxist philosophy.

This is what deep cynicism about ID politics (which, for these suckers, is *any* analysis which doesn't highlight class as the primary oppression) gets you: an analysis that can't stand to admit that Black people are disproportionately targeted by police killings. An analysis which refuses to understand that race and class mutually constitute one another in the US. So anyway, the take-home from this sorry excuse of an article is that there is no racial bias in police killings-- that instead police killings target the poor. (You'd think that Black people being disproportionately represented among the poor would logically mean that even if we ONLY analyzed class they'd be overrepresented, but let's see what these geniuses come up with as they completely loose their heads trying to make martyrs of the (white) working class).

The last bit of the article uses Alabama as an example and you BEST BELIEVE I checked their stats on my homeland because I get really touchy at people not from the south writing about it, and they're (surprise!) wrong!-- they completely misrepresented their findings and/or can't count. IF as they claim they followed the Washington Post 2017 reports + killedbypolice.net (2017) they should have broken down like this: According to KBP there were 29 killings-- 4 males killed with race unaccounted for; 11 Black people (10 men, 1 woman) killed; 13 white folk, 1 indigenous man (well, boy-- he was 15). Meanwhile, the stats for the Washington Post report are 6 killed, all Black. Both stats show disproportionate murder of Black people. WSWS reports 25 deaths with 14 white, 7 Black, and one hispanic. No clue where they got this data. Those numbers don't even equal 25 and they don't explain what happened to the other 3 people.