Wait, people actually pee IRL from those? I have bladder pressure induced "looking for a toilet" dreams ever, but I've never actually let go, I just wake up near to bursting.
A lot less than they could've done, if they just did a blanket forgiveness, and the conservative supreme court didn't strike it down like they struck down the 400b. Do you have any idea of the actual number, though? And how does that number compare to prior presidents? To the likely nonbiden outcomes of this election?
I agree that I want them to do more. This still is not a reason to let the guy who will make it so much worse into office. "This meal wasn't good enough, so I'm going to burn the house down," is not a rational perspective.
So, I don't disagree that he's doing those things. I'd also rather he stop those things, and push in the other direction, in a vacuum. It is not obvious to me that sending them weapons right now actually has much impact on their ability to conduct their genocide, and I suspect that what he is doing here, which again, I'd prefer he not, is in service to...
Reciprocity is a strong drive in humans. Giving someone something, even something they don't need, puts them in a space to agree to your requests, more so than if you flatly made them. It may be that those efforts, dislikable as they are from the perspective of an individual voter such as you or I, may be part of the realpolitik of getting Israel to stand the fuck down and stop killing people what the hell is wrong with you all seriously please please please stop fucking killing people. Ahem. He's been ramping up the pushback publically, and I think that pushback is lagging the private pushback, with the intent to have a stronger bargaining position. I will admit that I have insufficient data to have a strong belief in this area, and I do in fact rate that a weak belief, but it's consistent with the evidence I have.
This universe sucks and we need to make it better. Throwing up our hands and letting the guy who will send US troops to shove Gazans into the ocean and hold them underwater is the opposite of making it better. The majority of probability mass in november rests on a Biden-Trump competition. Of those options, I prefer Biden. Not because he's perfect, but because I can see that in a competition between bad and worse, worse is worse. Shit sucks. Opting not to vote doesn't opt you out of that world.
I took a handful of anecdotes from my online life and decided that people I encounter online have a decently high probability of being more examples of the same thing.
People have outright stated to me that they are doing purity politics. While I cannot prove that every single person I suggest is likely doing so, is actually doing so, I am not making such claims in a vacuum.
No, I do not expect someone who lost relatives in Gaza to vote for the person they blame for it. Humans are creatures of emotion first and logic second, and the vast majority of people won't be able to divorce themselves from their emotional state to do the expected value math. That doesn't mean that, by letting Trump win, they will be doing something other than permitting more people to get massacred faster.
Are you aware that the administration has been pushing on them to not do the shit they've been doing? It seems to me like the answer to that is no, and you expect Biden to just declare terms to a country half a world away which has quite a lot of weapons already, up to and including nuclear arms, I think. Israel is capable of producing weapons on their own. Today isn't 40 years ago.
Biden has done many things that are popular, but people are poorly informed. How much student debt has Biden forgiven, off the top of your head and without consulting the internet?
Unconditional US support from 2021-2024 is what got Israel there? Are you of the view that if we dumped them completely, right now, Israel would collapse or have no ability to prosecute their war against the Palestinians? To the best of my understanding, this is not the case, and I do not believe Biden has the ability to flatly dump Israel singlehandedly; I believe we have treaties with them, which are the law of the US and would need to be nullified by congress, which is never happening, and cannot reasonably be laid exclusively at Biden's feet.
It seems very much to me like people trying to keep some ideal of purity for themselves, and if someone who unironically says, "genocide Joe" would care to correct me I'm listening, but it's unclear how letting the guy who changed the us stance on settlements being unlawful to being totally cool win because of your unwillingness to recognize that this world is actively on fire, and we have to live with whatever future we steer to regardless.
"If you decide not to decide, you still have made a choice."
“It’s idiotic for us to take the bait,” said Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who clarified he was referring not to Duckworth’s bill on its face but to Democrats’ attempts to use the proposal as an IVF messaging tool. Vance said he’s not yet reviewed the actual bill.
It sure is. Also the bait is being against this perfectly reasonable protection, dude. Good job stepping on that rake.
Do you think that if you don't participate it goes away? Because people tried that in 2016, and it didn't go away, it got worse. You are participating in this world until you leave, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism but you still have to eat. The device you are writing your posts on most likely owns a share of a dead slave child. You can't live in this world and have totally clean hands. The best you can hope for is to steer it, a little bit, in a better direction, and sitting on your hands so you don't have to recognize the inevitable blood on them and get to feel pure ain't it, friend.
So, again, you'd rather this gets significantly worse. Because that's what comes from letting the republicans win.
Also Biden's done a lot of positive things. I voted for "not Trump" and he's well exceeded expectations. There have also been significant disappointments; I wanted him to be better on Israel / Palestine, but that's no good reason to give the office to the guy who'll happily nuke Gaza before he fellates Putin.
Look. The Dems are not good enough. 100% agree. But there's still a vast difference between "inadequately good" and "actively malicious", and it's pretty clear which party is which here. There's no comparison between the people who failed to protect abortion, and the people who want to send women to jail for miscarriages and herd trans people into camps, and if the inadequately good party had held power through the trump years instead of the actively malicious party, we wouldn't have the fucked up dobbs ruling, we wouldn't have the fucked up IVF ruling, we wouldn't have Tennessee making it legal to refuse to conduct marriage.
The Dems are weak. The Republicans hate us and want us to suffer and die.
And that makes him just as bad as the people who actively campaigned for and carried this out. On the same level, with no discernable difference between them, and that's why we should let the guy who nominated the judges who actually did this back into office so he can carry out the vengeance he's promising. I expect that'll work out great. Virtually identical to another Biden term.
Maybe he should've. It looked like a settled issue at that point with the duration of precedent. It might have been better if he did, during the brief window that supermajority existed, but that doesn't mean it happened on his watch. Those judges were put in office when he was out of office and could do nothing, and when the ruling happened it was entirely out of his hands.
Yeah, he absolutely should have replaced the supreme Court judges trump placed that made the ruling! Or at least he should have ordered them to rule differently by executive order!
The border bill they negotiated, yes. Once trump said not to give Biden any wins, the bill they negotiated and were in favor of was suddenly the worst border bill possible. I have talked to people on this platform who had that talking point.
HopeOfTheGunblade @ HopeOfTheGunblade @kbin.social Posts 0Comments 525Joined 2 yr. ago
Wait, people actually pee IRL from those? I have bladder pressure induced "looking for a toilet" dreams ever, but I've never actually let go, I just wake up near to bursting.