TheSanSabaSongbird @ TheSanSabaSongbird @lemdro.id

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2 yr. ago

Except that if Trump wins there wont be any voters to win since we won't have elections anymore. What part about a dictatorship do you people not understand?

Somebody doesn't understand basic game theory.

You're not about to change your mind anyway, so why not have some fun calling you out for what you are?

This is incorrect. The executive was never intended to be anywhere near as powerful as it has become. It has become increasingly powerful over the years for a suite of reasons, some perfectly legitimate (like the threat of nuclear war), but most because of cowardice in the legislative together with the conservative theory of the unitary presidency.

There's an entire body of literature in poly sci on the subject and how it can be addressed.

Again, while I don't necessarily otherwise disagree with you, you are a little confused on whataboutism.

That's not whataboutism. Whataboutism is changing the subject to derail the conversation. This is simply addressing a different point of view in the same discussion.

No. The best information is that they've been putting a ton of pressure on Netanyahu to back the fuck off, but it hasn't done any good because he's a legitimate asshole and always has been. (Remember, this is the same guy who deliberately embarrassed Obama by accepting a GOP invitation to address Congress without consulting the White House or making an official state visit to the president. He's the scum of the earth and always has been. There's zero question that he's hoping for a Trump win.)

They don't want to go public with demanding restraint or a cease fire because they are afraid it will widen the war by encouraging Iran and its other proxies such as the Houthis and Hezbollah which could further hinder freight traffic through the Red Sea, thus bumping global inflation back up and giving Trump a campaign gift. I think at this point it's a lost cause and they need to cut their losses and tell Israel to knock it the fuck off, but I expect they will continue to drag their feet and work on back channels.

We also know that every time Iran has been met with real force rather than empty threats, they have backed off. Ultimately it would still be a big gamble to openly threaten them, but it's something to think about, especially if you don't fancy another Trump presidency/dictatorship.

Most of what we see on Lemmy is pure amateur hour speculation that has only a very tangential relationship with what's actually happening.

The presidency was never meant to be as powerful as it has become.

Bullshit. Leaving aside any potential humanitarian concerns, this whole thing is a massive headache for the Biden Administration.

Horseshit. I've spent literally decades reporting on land-use issues in the rural west. That, together with the reintroduction of wolves in the intermountain west, is kind of my life's work as a journalist thus far.

I actually don't even know where to start with how wrong you are.

While I am definitely onboard with your skepticism of elite institutions such as Harvard, I urge caution in automatically attaching a negative connotation as a sort of reactionary default. More than one thing can be true at once and while it's entirely possible that our elitist system creates a lot of bullshit, it can also be true that our elite educational institutions create a lot of good.

It wasn't the media at all though; it was fucking Elise Stefanik deliberately interrupting her prior response to hide the fact that her response was the same with regard to student speech vis black people or Israel.

Michelle Goldberg did a great write up of it in the NYT.

But let me correct myself. The news media in general did blow it by not catching on to and calling out what Stefanik did, but it wasn't universal as obviously some of us, including Michelle Goldberg, understood Stefanik's intellectually dishonest fake-out.

Not for lack of effort on my part.

This place is swarming with idiots. I think it's an age thing. There are a lot of young people on Lemmy and they tend to be very wedded to viewing the world in strictly ideological terms with little nuance and no real appreciation for how complex the real world actually is. As a result, it's almost impossible to be critical of anything without being subjected to pointless and condescending whataboutism.

Why not both? A well-designed poll can be a very useful gauge of public opinion.

I mean, thanks for the good faith effort I guess, but you're still objectively incorrect as a matter of the historical record.

You would have done better to single out the Interstate freeway system as "conservative," since it was created under Eisenhower. But even that is a weak example since it wasn't opposed by liberals at all.

Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive, part of the "progressive era" in US political history. There isn't a way to spin it such that he can accurately be called a conservative. The conservative position on national parks, at least in the west, would be that they should remain open for resource extraction. We see this at play with the recent bullshit surrounding the Bears Ears National Monument de-designation under Trump and the ongoing effort to allow drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.

You are simply objectively incorrect.

LOL! I see you've passed the Lemmy Bar Exam.

You're the one trotting out a simplistic black and white vision as if anything about any part of history is or can ever be explained in such terms. History is always much more complicated than our ideological biases would like.

There's zero context in your comment. It's just as biased as the meme is. You're blithely glossing over the much larger historical context of WW2 and why the US was there in the first place, and you're eliding the rather obvious fact that a sizable majority of Koreans were opposed to the attempted communist takeover in the first place.

The salient fact about the 2nd half of the 20th century, that is routinely ignored by Lemmy's tankies, is that the men guiding US foreign policy had survived the largest war in human history and were absolutely and legitimately terrified that there would be another even worse war in the very near future if they didn't do everything they could to prevent the kind of runaway imperialism seen in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Furthermore, these men knew for a fact --as even Lemmy's tankies will admit-- that communism by design and by doctrine can only come to its final stage in a globally hegemonic system. If you honestly believed, as they clearly did, that fighting a war in Korea --which after all had been liberated from Imperial Japan by the US-- was part of a much larger strategy to contain communism and thereby prevent a 3rd world war, you would feel yourself morally obliged to do it.

We can argue about whether or not they were correct in their beliefs, but we can't simply condemn them as evil imperialists. That's just stupid reductionist bullshit. Reality is always much more complicated than simple black and white "my team good, your team bad."