Links for Friday, March 22
Summary execution has not gone away, and other tales
Five meaty links for your perusing pleasure, and a musical treat.
Links
Today’s links offer insight into the dangerous mind of the state, or at least its current thinking. There’s also a comment on Obamacare you may not have heard, and praise for Lena Khan.
Enjoy.
• Ralph Nader: Real Gaza Death Toll at Least 200,000 (Naked Capitalism)
With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000? With 5,000 babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine, and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas Health Ministry’s official count is warranted.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death and injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting them, and not building shelters.
I think even this number, 200,000, is probably low. From the same piece:
[In a] December 29, 2023 opinion piece in The Guardian … the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Devi Sridhar … predicted half a million deaths in 2024 if conditions continue unabated.
There were roughly 2.3 million souls in Gaza before the Israelis attacked. How many must be gone before the land is cleansed?
File under “Genocide by any other name…”
• The US Government’s Plot to Murder Julian Assange (The Nation)
The subtitle says it all:
While dictators kill troublesome journalists with guns and missiles, democracies can afford to be more patient. But the end result is the same.
More:
While the Trump administration dropped plans for Assange’s extrajudicial murder, neither it nor the Biden administration has turned away from killing him slowly in solitary confinement in Britain and, if the British appeals court agrees to his extradition, in an American super-maximum-security prison for the rest of his life. Physicians have testified that Assange, whose health is already jeopardized by the appalling conditions he has had to endure in London’s Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison since April 2019, risks suicide if he is sent to the United States. Britain’s High Court of Justice is considering the case, following hearings in February in which Assange’s counsel introduced evidence about the CIA’s earlier intent to kill him. The intention remains the same; only the means have altered.
I wrote about this here:
File under “Death with no fingerprints on the weapon.”