aleph @ aleph @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

What happened is that Biden and his team completely screwed up. They called for this debate and agreed to its terms, which included the fact that the moderator team would not be fact checking Trump in order to avoid accusations of bias.

These terms shifted the onus of calling Trump out on his biggest lies to Biden himself, who would have known that Trump would try to gish-gallop his way through the debate and avoid discussing policy because that's precisely what he did in 2020. The fact that Biden failed spectacularly to counter Trump in any meaningful way is the reason why he lost the debate.

That's the point - they closed ranks and kept riding the Biden train whilst quietly hoping that no one would notice it was in danger of coming off the rails.

https://theintercept.com/2024/06/28/biden-debate-dnc/

Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves. They stayed mum for three and half years and now they’re reaping the whirlwind.

☝️

Being a narcissistic, bloviating despot is exactly what everyone expected of Trump. In fact, he came off rather well from the time constraints, muted mics, and the total lack of fact-checking because the format of the debate didn't expose his weaknesses like it did for Biden.

I'd say a good-sized part of it is simply the American preference for watching beautiful, weathly people doing beautiful, wealthy people things. Hollywood rom-coms and US TV shows in general clearly skew towards upper middle class settings when compared to the equivalents from, say, the UK.

In other words, I reckon US media prefer their fictional characters to be aspirational whereas other cultures prefer theirs to be relatable.

hasn’t Biden had a stutter from a very young age and struggled with it most of his life?

It hasn't apparently impacted his public speaking for most of his political career up until recently:

https://youtu.be/86Nrv5izaTs?si=bZ9WNXIEZNOaBV3T

And even when not speaking during tonight's debate, he often looked totally bewildered.

People have been saying this for quite a while now despite the excuses from the Democrat establishment, but tonight there was no hiding the fact that the dude just looks unable to last another four years as president.

Calling Biden articulate is being incredibly generous. I mean, what on earth was he trying to communicate here?

Overall, Biden put in a very lackluster, unconvincing performance while Trump did his usual schtick of rambling off topic, lying through his teeth, and refusing to answer any questions on policy. The whole thing was a shambles.

I think Tlaib did a decent job at giving some kind of pushback, but it was particularly galling to see Moskowitz stand up and repeat Israeli propaganda without anyone calling him out on it.

In his speech, he alluded to misinformation that was debunked over a month ago: that the numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry were allegedly unreliable and that the numbers of dead civilians had recently been halved by the UN. Neither of these things were true, and so therefore he was either lying on Israel's behalf or he didn't care enough to do the appropriate research.

More frequent kernel updates.

Yes, but those figures are very broad and primarily involve activities related to public relations, tourism and trade agreements. AIPAC is different.

Not only does AIPAC directly involve itself in US elections, it is not registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which puts tighter scrutiny on where the money comes from and how it is spent.

It's quite a bit more complicated than that. Firstly, ultra-orthodox Jews (a.k.a Haredim) are mostly non-zionist. They also only make up roughly 33% of Israeli settlers.

Traditionally, the Haredim have voted for their own center-right Haredi parties, but a minority (especially the younger generation) are now drifting further rightward towards the nationalist Religious Zionist party of Ben Gvir and Smotrich that is particularly popular amongst the settlers. Despite this recent trend, though, the majority of Haredim remain Anti-Zionist.

It's this stance, combined with the facts that Haredi men have been able to avoid military service and have relied heavily on social security to fund their living costs, that has caused a lot of resentment towards them from the majority of Israeli society. As the article above notes, this removal of their military service exemption has overwhelming support amongst the general population.

But you're definitely right in saying that this throws a spanner in the works, albeit mostly for Netanyahu. His brittle coalition relies heavily on support from the two main Haredi parties in the Knesset. This new policy could backfire on him.

That's why they're running the disclaimers now - the trial hasn't been held yet and they're bracing themselves for impact.

Unlike Fox News, who could settle with Dominion for $787M and carry on as usual, Newsmax's pockets don't run nearly as deep. If the court rules against them in September, they'll most likely be utterly screwed.

It really is insane. Just imagine a different PAC whose sole purpose is to advocate for any other foreign nation - and not just the obvious "baddies" like Russia, China, etc. - spending millions of dollars to oppose the election of congress members who don't follow their agenda, and then openly bragging about it on social media. People would lose their goddamn minds, and rightfully so.

• requires a fair bit of post-installation configuration (suboptimal OOTB experience for newbies)
• Uses btrfs by default but comes with no snapshots or GUI manager pre-configured for system restore
• Less software availability compared to Ubuntu or Mint
• More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint

A few US outlets have mentioned it fleetingly, but here's a more balanced account from Haaretz.

Here is a flyer circulated by the protest organizers:

Here is a flyer advertizing the real estate sale itself:

Here is an archived copy of the real estate sale web page (which is currently unavailable):

https://web.archive.org/web/20240624010428/https://homeinisrael-il.com/

Here is a listing for property in Efrat, which is an illegal Israeli settlement located in the West Bank:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240324124658/https://homeinisrael-il.com/property/efrat-hamoshava/

Much as it was when the counter-protesters showed up at UCLA last month and attacked the protesters with pepper spray and sticks for hours while the police stood by and watched.

Yes, to be fair I now see the LA Times did mention it. Fair play to them, as I've read several articles about this incident and this the first time I've seen the reason for the protest actually included in the article.

Important context: the synagogue in question was holding a real estate sale for land allegedly stolen from Palestinians in the West Bank.

This protest was not against Jews praying at a synagogue. This protest was not antisemitic. This was a protest against the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and against settlements that Biden's own administration considers illegal.

But I suppose the AP doesn't consider that relevant information.

I wonder why the majority of the US news media is neglecting to mention this highly relevant fact 🤔

The Death of Stalin is great.