TheSanSabaSongbird @ TheSanSabaSongbird @lemdro.id

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2 yr. ago

Came to this thread for my daily dose of trite cynicism. Was not disappointed.

Oh good! I was hoping for some defeatism in the face of a relatively positive bit of news.

You shouldn't let it bother you. Life is too short. Just ignore it.

Too right. My old man spent his 19th birthday at Dragon Mountain in Vietnam, outside of Pleiku in the Central Highlands along the border with Laos. He was a Huey door-gunner with the 4th ID and survived being shot down.

Every mission he flew, he knew could be his last, and they used to use gaffer's tape to patch the bullet holes in the fuselage of their UH1s because otherwise they'd "whistle" when they were coming up on an LZ or evac zone.

My dad was the guy in the doorway with the M60, and that breaks my mind in the sense that I can't imagine being that age and fighting in a real war.

https://www.google.com/search?q=th+man+in+the+doorway+&client=ms-android-google&sca_esv=589510079&sxsrf=AM9HkKnfIpwk9F-1ldMeFZdtV6JZjE7Cdg%3A1702188491365&ei=y1V1ZbjpFZ65kPIPtrya2Ao&oq=th+man+in+the+doorway+&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIhZ0aCBtYW4gaW4gdGhlIGRvb3J3YXkgMgcQABiABBgNMgcQIRigARgKMgcQIRigARgKMgsQABiABBiKBRiGAzILEAAYgAQYigUYhgMyChAhGBYYHhgPGB0yCBAhGBYYHhgdMggQIRgWGB4YHUjkZ1DTF1inR3ABeAGQAQCYAeABoAGTD6oBBjMuMTAuMrgBA8gBAPgBAcICChAAGEcY1gQYsAPCAgQQIxgnwgIFEC4YgATCAgYQABgWGB7CAggQABgWGB4YCsICCxAAGBYYHhjxBBgKwgIFEAAYgATCAggQLhgWGB4YCsICBxAuGIAEGA3CAgcQLhgNGIAEwgIIEAAYCBgeGA3CAgsQIRgWGB4Y8QQYHeIDBBgAIEGIBgGQBgg&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:57e3175f,vid:fq0vFuIcOac,st:0

This is a pleasant fiction, one that feeds into a broad sense of anti-Americanism in ways that are not well thought out, but that are appealing to knee-jerk notions attached to an understandable animosity toward US power.

The truth is that the US is a giant country consisting of hundreds of millions of people from all over the world and you discount us at your peril.

Dang! A measured and well-thought-out comment on Lemmy vis Israel and the current situation!

Good on you sir, or madam, as the case may be. Such comments are dishearteningly rare in an environment that's dominated by knee-jerk one-liners on the part of naive partisans who cannot be bothered with trafficking in nuance.

Right? I'm in my 50s and both of my grandfathers happened to fight in the Pacific --though one was also in North Africa-- and you could not know those men and imagine that anything about their experiences was somehow invented or a lie. Not when you sat face to face with them.

We have pics of my grandfather on Saipan with his boys after they'd survived Guadalcanal, for example, and you just can't make that shit up. It's way too real.

Have you considered that there might be a great deal of regional variation such that while it seems "ridiculous" in your particular region and social context, in other parts of the country people are operating on an entirely different set of "received" facts about reality?

I pose this question because if the last decade has taught us anything, it's that we cannot take for granted that we are all operating on the basis of the same "facts" with regard to history and reality.

Biden thought that Trump would be politically finished if he lost the 2020 election --and in a rational world he would've been-- but he underestimated both the cowardice of Republican leaders and the slavish devotion of Trump's followers, as did many of us, myself included. That's why he feels obligated to take the safe route instead of stepping down. If Trump was gone or otherwise not the existential threat that I and many others believe he is, I doubt very much that Biden would be running again.

Trump won't win the nomination in 2028, so if he's still alive and still semi-intelligable, he'll launch a third party campaign that splits the conservative vote and gives the Dems 4 more years. You saw it here first.

This is by far the more accurate historical analogy.

That's because it's bullshit. The lemmy consensus on this kind of thing is badly skewed to the left and is basically pure amateur hour. Without doubt there are many intelligent and well-informed users who have a better grasp of the realities of US electoral politics, they just aren't the majority, and so we find objectively ridiculous comments receiving tons of up votes while anyone who dares to mention an unpopular truth is downvoted to Hades

Because Harris would then become the default nominee and Biden knows she can't win. It's either that or a punishing primary resulting in some other nominee, but who would that be? Could they beat Trump? It would be a big gamble. Biden running for a 2nd term is a gamble too, but it probably is the safer bet. His real mistake was having someone as unpopular as Harris as a VP.

I think he would be happy to hand it off to her if he thought she could win.

I also think that it didn't occur to Biden that Trump would still be viable after being defeated in 2020, but of course, like many of us, he underestimated both the cowardice of most Republican leaders and the depravity of Trump's base.

Here's what I can pretty much guarantee will be an unpopular observation; Israel is 100 percent committed to eliminating Hamas, for understandable reasons. They aren't going to stop until the job is done. Therefore, if you really care about innocent Palestinian civilians getting killed, you should want to give Israel more aid since the faster they are able to destroy Hamas, the less innocent civilians get killed.

Not sure that I agree with the morality of this proposition. It seems pretty sound, but I am still wrestling with it.

No, none of the other GOP candidates have anything even remotely like Trump's grip on the base. Without that none of the above can happen. Trump got where he is through a long series of steps that Kagan details in the piece. There is no world in which some other candidate steps in and immediately plugs into the same kind of power that Trump has amassed as a result of Republican cowardice. Every one of them would have to start over with consolidating power in a party that's swarming with amoral power-hungry grifters.

Just because he's a neocon piece of shit doesn't mean he can't be right. Also, dude, Glen Greenwald is no fucking saint either. That guy is a certified scumbag. At least with Kagan there's a chance that he actually believes his bullshit, whereas with Greenwald, we know he's an intellectually dishonest grifter.

It's fun that you think Bezos takes any interest or part in the day to day workings of the WaPo.

That sounds like a media literacy problem, not a problem with opinion pieces themselves. I have a degree in journalism and the idea that anyone could somehow not know the difference between a straight news story and an opinion piece is baffling. Do we not have basic critical thinking skills anymore?

That's just intellectually lazy. We should be able to process analysis that isn't our own.

No, these are op-eds, which are written by contributors and are different from editorials which, as the name suggests, are written by the editorial board. Op-eds traditionally were printed opposite of the editorial page --hence the name-- and were meant to be a space for subject matter experts or other thought leaders to publish opinion pieces that may or may not reflect the views of the editorial board.

I know these things because even though I've never worked for a newspaper, I am old enough to have gotten an undergrad degree in journalism back in the 90s before the newspaper industry died.