sailingbythelee @ sailingbythelee @lemmy.world

Posts

9

Comments

684

Joined

2 yr. ago

Agreed. Musk was a good hype man back in the day, but now he is a liability. It seems like Tesla would be better off without him at this point.

Deoodorant is the gift you give to those around you. So, if someone needs deodorant so bad that they need to steal it...I'm thinking you should just let them have it.

You nailed it. The Dems should win overwhelmingly given how divided, useless and repugnant the Repubs have been for the last decade. Unfortunately, the race is closer than it should be.

Too many leftists make the lazy assumption that half of America is a bunch of racist, homophobic cretins. There is a kernel of truth behind that assumption, in the sense that rural communities tend to be small-c conservative, more religious, more homogenous, and less keen on cultural change. But Trump is none of those things, so what gives? The real answer to the rise of Trumpism is alienation.

I live in a pretty rural area. Just a couple of decades ago, millions of people in flyover states could easily get decent, secure factory or resource sector jobs right out of high school. All those jobs created vibrant communities, but now most of those jobs are gone and there is little chance of those jobs coming back. The vast majority of regular blue-collar folks don't really give too much of a shit about hot-button cultural issues like homosexuality or Palestine or abortion. They may not like those things, but those issues are peripheral to the main issue, which is having a well-paying, secure job that doesn't involve sitting at a desk all day. They know in their bones that is was the corporate establishment, in cahoots with the "liberal" elites in the boardrooms of the coast, that got rich by shipping all of their jobs overseas. And they are fucking pissed off about it. I completely agree that a real labour-oriented populist like Bernie could have done well in the rural states, but instead we got Trump, who is a fake narcissist populist who is just riding the wave of alienation.

This blackmailing of Biden by threatening to facilitate another Trump presidency is such bullshit. As Biden has rightly said, democracy in America is on the ballot, and that is a far, far, FAR more important issue than a temporary flare-up in a decades-long conflict in the Middle East. Biden has to appease moderates if he is to prevent Trump from winning. He, therefore, doesn't want to engage in a MAJOR foreign policy shift that would scare moderates and distract from Trump's legal woes. You don't have to love Biden or the Democratoc Party, but Biden has been doing politics practically forever, which, if nothing else, means that he knows better than anyone on Lemmy how to beat Trump. Don't make perfect the enemy of good.

Got caught smoking a joint? Slavery for you.

Pissed off a cop? Slavery for you, too.

I don't think slavery being the punishment for crime is the defense you think you think it is. It's fucking barbaric.

Oh yeah, and don't try organizing for better conditions either. The leaders of the 2018 prison strike in the US were tortured via indefinite solitary confinement.

It's war. Both sides constantly use propaganda to their advantage. Propaganda is just story-telling. The best propaganda is fact-based, but framed in a particular way that is favorable to the propagandist. I would suggest that Hamas is particularly good at propaganda nowadays.

Israel, on the other hand, relies primarily on established sympathy among older people who formed their positive opinions about Israel back in 70s, 80s, and 90s. Israel was the "little engine that could": a tiny country surrounded by genocidal autocratic countries determined to exterminate it. Israel was like the Athenians successfully battling the Persian Empire with their small but plucky citizen militia. Believe it or not, Israel was seen as the underdog in those days.

Young people today only know Israel as the right-wing, corrupt shithole is has become under Netanyahu. And Israel isn't trying very hard to convince them otherwise. The sooner Netanyahu and his religious zealots are gone, the better for everyone.

"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

Yes, we will hold the world hostage with our Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve until they bow to our demands.

Supply Management. Dairy is not a free market in Canada. It is a cartel in which each producer gets a quota. The US complains about it constantly because they massively over-produce dairy, which drops the price of US dairy products, which they then want to export to Canada. It would give us consumers lower prices, but would probably kill our dairy indistry. Or at least that's what we are told. I don't have enough knowledge to say whether that story is valid.

Calling someone names because they disagree with you isn't helpful to the conversation, if that is indeed why you are here.

The bar for plausibility is very low, and rightly so, because the intention is to intervene early and protect civilians. The court will most likely issue an order to stop the fighting for humanitarian reasons. However, it will probably take a couple of years before they make a determination regarding the allegations of genocide.

It is not a "fact" that Israel "created" Hamas. Providing some funding 20 years after their founding is not creating. Perhaps calling that a "conspiracy theory" was not the best choice of words. Clarifying what I meant with further conversation is not "bs". Questioning my integrity rather than engaging with the argument is an ad hominem attack.

Apple is the company we all love to hate.

The big difference is convenience. I've got an inexpensive Brother laser printer. It is probably 12 years old now and is as good as the day I bought it. I've only replaced the toner cartridge once or twice. I set it up on my home server so it's available on all of our family devices (well, not the phones). When the kids wake up in the morning and suddenly realize they have to print off their homework for school, it's no problem at all.

I must say that I don't understand why people like yourself always jump to questioning people's motives and honesty rather than engaging directly with the argument. It is basically an ad hominem attack.

How nice of you to tell me what I should have said to make you believe me. Charming.

I don't disagree that Netanyahu and his right wing coalition were complicit with Hamas, and that regime change is needed. I've said that in other comments in this thread.

I push back against the simplistic statement that "Israel created Hamas". It is way more complicated than that. Hamas was founded in 1987 as a splinter group of the Muslim Brotherhood. Also, Hamas was elected by the Palestinian people, not the Israeli government. And, they are part of a wider radical Islamist movement, along with ISIS and the Houthis, that are sponsored by Iran. You could just as well say that Hamas was "created" by Iran.

I also push back because simply saying that Israel "created" Hamas, as if it were Israel's fault alone, implies a lack of agency on the part of Hamas. Even if Netanyahu and his nutty right wing coalition provided some funding for Hamas, it was Hamas itself that carried out the raping and murdering on October 7. They own that atrocity, even if many other actors are complicit in it.

That's a conspiracy theory.

I don't think Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Israel is trying to take out Hamas, but Hamas is using the Palestinian people as human shields.

That is their strategy. Hamas spent 15 years digging in to Gaza, including under hospitals. Then they commit an extremely provocative atrocity, using rape as a weapon of terror, which was guaranteed to rile up the Israelis for war. Just like Osama bin Laden did to the Americans. And then the Hamas leadership flees to Qatar where they can watch the chaos unfold. It's diabolical. But it has been done before.

Most politicians in Canada are middle class, with the exception of some "star candidates" from the business and banking sectors who bring in lots of rich-friend donor money for the party.