These “I’m not gonna vote for Biden because my principles are too important” folks are really starting to piss me off.
Where were your principles last year? The year before? Where were they when Russia invaded Ukraine? What about the Rohingya? The Yazidi? How about here at home and what Republican power - in congress and across the courts? Where will they be if Trump wins and appoints another SCOTUS judge and packs the federal courts? When hundreds of transgender Americans are murdered? When women no longer have any autonomy over their bodies?
This isn’t about your principles. It’s not about you looking cool in a keffiyeh. This is about all of us on the left working together to reduce the most harm. You in your enormous privilege are not the main character here.
I mean seriously… get the fuck over yourselves you spoiled brats.
Well put. The only principle we should be considering is saving as many lives as possible and preventing as much persecution as possible. Adherence to any principles which go against this simply shows those principles are not worth holding, not as absolutes at least.
Voting for the democrats isn’t saving lives though. The red states are just going ahead with massive civil rights violations anyways. If the democrats won’t step in to stop them then we don’t have a reason to vote for them anymore. The worst case scenario is already happening. It’s not in the future, it’s now.
Voting for the democrats isn’t saving lives though.
How do you prove or disprove this?
If the democrats won’t step in to stop them then we don’t have a reason to vote for them anymore
Do you not understand how our system of government works? Or do you just want some sort of left-leaning fascism? Admittedly, Bernie would make a great benevolent dictator… but that’s exactly the kind of thing that bites you in the ass eventually.
The president has more power than you think he does. Trump reminded us of that. And it’s simple to prove. What has he done to stop Abbot and DeSantis? He has how many federal law enforcement officers? And he hasn’t just arrested the Texas national guardsmen operating illegally on the border? Hell he could just call them to federal duty and send them to an ammo dump in Alaska.
Look up title 10 orders. The president is the commander in chief. If he won’t pull those guardsmen out of there it’s because he doesn’t mind what they’ve done.
The pure fucking irony of you saying that when everything I just suggested is based in existing law and precedent.
The pure fucking irony of you saying that when everything I just suggested is based in existing law and precedent.
LOL. You are clearly ignorant of the practical implications of such things and more generally of how politics works in real terms.
Every action a president takes either gains or loses political capital. The president does not operate in a vacuum… indeed our entire system of government is designed to have checks and balances and specifically to keep the authority of a president confined.
I must say, you have such an incredibly simplistic view of this… it’s quite stunning. You literally sound like a MAGAt, begging for authoritarian control.
So now we’re moving the goal posts. It’s political capital and not political system.
I agree, what he spends his capital on shows what he cares about. Good thing there’s not some black hole of a situation he’s just dumping capital into right now…
I suspect a lot of those people are arguing in bad faith and are actually spreading misinformation. That they never intended on voting for Biden, or always intended on voting for Trump and trying to make it seem like Biden is losing his base.
IRL, most people I know, while not happy with Biden’s response acknowledge that Trump’s view is much much worse.
Psh, I’m voting for him. I’m doing a lot of other stuff to improve society in ways I think are important, but when it comes to my presidential vote, Biden is the lesser evil in a voting system that requires I take that into consideration.
Well yeah, I’m not just sitting here complaining to the internet either. I just don’t think the democrats are ever going to turn around and stop chasing the republicans if we blindly vote for them. If they let the republicans go further and further to the right without chasing them then the republican party dies as another party replaces them. If the democrats go further and further right leaving the left unserved then the same thing will happen to them. I happen to believe that we’ve reached that point. The democrats have been chasing the republicans since Reagan.
I think they’ve started to turn around in the last decade or so, but not fast enough for my liking. They definitely were heading to the right for a good long while before that though, especially on economic issues.
Biden’s shut down of the unions; sign off on immigration policies that are harsher than Trump’s; protectionist gift to the donor class wrapped in climate change; and stance on Gaza and the protestors convinces me they aren’t. They talked a good game in 2020 but showed they understand how to play the game pretty much right away. They restored some rational stuff for COVID but other than that they ran to the right right away.
I think this is what people call accelerationism, meaning you want to crash the plane so it can be rebuilt.
I get it… It’s very frustrating to have to choose a candidate you’re not excited for, or worse. I’d ask you if you have any loved ones who require healthcare, or anyone who’s LGBT, or someone non white. They’re the people who are most at risk with the hate mongering that’s going on with that guy’s base.
No, it’s not accelerationist to just withhold your vote. Accelerationists are going to do things to bring about the anarchy state they think we need to rebuild properly. So stuff like attacking the power grid or attempting to start a race war (for white supremacist accelerationists). Not voting for someone and working to create a new political party is how the system is designed to be used.
As long as you understand that not voting for Biden is 100% a vote for Trump (whether you cast a ballot or not) and you’re OK with that, then more power to you.
But I would ask, what do you think you’re achieving by not voting for him? If you voted for him in 2020 then you must hold personal ideals that at least semi-align with his, and you have to know that Trump’s are a complete 180 from them.
I’d also like to ask (since you imply you haven’t made up your mind) what Biden could do to change your mind?
Oh I’m arguing in bad faith because I called out your gaslighting? Conflating disillusioned voters with voters for the other team is a top tier propaganda technique meant to shore up base loyalty. And here you are executing it to a T.
Or you know, at no point did you actually engage in discussion. You used a false equivalent and rhetoric. Which is pretty much the textbook definition of a bad faith argument.
Oh I don’t think it’s a false equivalence. You seem just about the same as the average sports ball fan to me, just with your political party. And I absolutely engaged in a conversation. You just didn’t merit a longer reply when your assertion was gaslighting. So stop doing that.
It is more like the trolly problem, one is bad, the other is much worse. The difference is that whether you’re a fan of a football team or not it does not affect the outcome, but voting does affect the outcome albeit marginally.
The analogy isn’t about voting it’s about their vociferous defense of Biden and categorizing people as loyal or not. And the trolley problem likewise presents the problem as only having two tracks when history shows us that’s not true. There’s nearly infinite tracks. Including one where Biden comes around on Israel and wins the election.
I hope people realize that that Witcher quote “If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all.” was explicitly written to be wrong, and only served as a “Before” of a maturing character arc.
I don’t even remember that, was that from the books, games, or TV show? At any rate, no obviously I had no problem voting for him in 2020. In 2020 he wasn’t supporting the mass murder of civilians in Gaza and asylees in South/Central America. In 2020 he promised to do something to stop the red states from persecuting people. In 2020 we thought he’d have a sane plan for exiting Afghanistan and would bring our interpreters and civilian support out of the country, (Instead veterans had to go back over there and get them themselves in shit Hollywood’s going to make a movie about anytime now). In 2020 we thought he’d surge funding for the military mental health crisis. And so so much more.
The only difference between them is language. Both have no problem with slaughtering women and children and we are seeing it now. Biden doesn’t care and is supplying the weapons, just like he didn’t care when Lebanon was invaded.
Begin said Biden “rose and delivered a very impassioned speech” defending the invasion. Begin said he was shocked at how passionately Biden supported Israel’s invasion when Biden “said he would go even further than Israel, adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children.” Begin said, “I disassociated myself from these remarks,” adding: “I said to him: No, sir; attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war. Sometimes there are casualties among the civilian population as well. But it is forbidden to aspire to this. This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.” The comments were striking from Begin, who had been notorious as a leader of the Irgun, a militant group that carried out some of the worst acts of ethnic cleansing accompanying the creation of the state of Israel, including the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre.
Obama gave people hope. Then Biden ran a very progressive campaign after Hillary lost a normal campaign. Our principles were always in play. Nothing has changed, Biden still has to earn votes and nothing Trump said is different from what Biden is doing. He’s just saying it out loud. For the record Israel just bombed a known refugee tent camp and this is what other countries are saying. This is what the White House said. Either Biden is a joke that keeps getting played by Netanyahu or Biden thinks we’re a joke. Either way is not going to win him votes. And his entire job is to win votes by representing the people. I doubt the kids being denied their college degrees care much whose in white house when the police stormed their protest encampment.
Biden still has to earn votes and nothing Trump said is different from what Biden is doing. He’s just saying it out loud.
You have to be in a position to not be affected by Republican policies to think that. Really to be single-minded about one issue, no matter how valid in itself, while ignoring everything else that affects so many so badly.
You may think you get virtue points for this but what you are showing is just how incredibly privileged and selfish you are.
I’m not doing it for “points”. The entire idea that this is some child’s game is the problem. People are already dying in massive numbers, here and abroad. Democrats want to just continue the status quo, while the republicans keep changing the status quo.
The entire idea that this is some child’s game is the problem
It’s precisely that you can’t wrap your head around the fact that this is NOT a child’s game where you get to personally pick - for everyone else - the one issue that matters to you this week that is the problem.
Being pro-palestine is not the definition of the left, the truth is things would only be worse for Palestine if Trump is elected, and in exchange for this punishment of the Dems the potential losses are immense and not just for Palestine. Being pro-palestine is very popular among the far right as well, and they are cheering for Trump just the same as you have been implicitly.
Liberalism and the Democratic Party are on the right. Joe Biden was friends with Strom Thurmond. Joe Biden demonized “busing” and other programs to integrate schools. Joe Biden cheered the slaughter of women in children in Lebanon in 1982. Biden is basically Trump but with more eloquence. Their actions are the same. Palestinians are getting slaughtered right now, protestors are getting beaten up and jailed right now. Trump is just the boogeyman Democrats use to get their voters to stop demanding anything.
You are not going to get Arab-Americans to vote for Biden, forget it. You want us to carry water for someone slaughtering us while grinning. I voted for him in 2020 and that will be the last time I ever vote Democratic, the first time was for John Kerry in 2004. Voting Republican is of course not an option, it is third party from now on though I am making arrangements to leave the country. I am paying taxes to give myself PTSD watching Arabs get slaughtered with my tax money. I know most people don’t have the means to leave the US, but I do.
Biden could have stopped this genocide from day one, not only he didn’t but he continues to supply the weapons and political cover for Israel to continue massacring women and children. There’s enough Arab-Americans to swing the election one way or another. Biden and the Democratic Party will have to earn our votes rather than extract them from us by scaring us with Trump.
He won in 2016 despite me voting for Clinton. In 2020 I thought Biden couldn’t be worse, but I got a genocide. In 2024 I’m voting for someone I like for a change. Clinton too is never getting a vote from after she posted this. Cheering and justifying a genocide is where I part ways with the Democratic Party.
By not sending weapons, by withholding financial aid, by not justifying the crimes and by not vetoing the U.N. ceasefire vote multiple times. Reagan and Bush Sr. were able to do so. No surprise that Thurmond-loving Biden is to their right somehow.
It’s your right to vote 3rd party, but doing so makes it only more likely that Trump will take office and ruin not just Palestine but the ability for Arab Americans and possibly every foreign born, and possibly non-white person in general, to live in the US. In our current political system, third parties count for nothing, it’s a wasted vote. I’m not thrilled by Biden either but voting for president has to be strategic.
You are funny. Arab Americans and Muslim Americans do overlap and both care deeply about Palestine, but are still two different groups. Most Arabs in the US are actually Christian, and the news article I linked to mentioned Arab Americans.
a little more than half of voters classified as likely to decide the presidential election say threats to democracy are extremely important to their vote for president, … Yet, more of them trust Trump to handle those threats than Biden.
They can’t really do that if there’s a Democrat in the White House and the courts are semi rational. You really can’t stop a certified drug from being distributed through the post office nationally. But, you change either of those conditions and the lunatics will run the asylum. They’ll bring back sodomy laws too.
Yeah the GOP has the ability to defacto veto any legislation in the country. Kacsmaryk will issue a nationwide injunction on any policy they ask him to. It’s fucking nuts.
And then the courts try to rein in this obvious forum shopping and the Northern District in TX just says “naw, we aren’t going to listen to that”. How the fuck does that shit fly?!
It really is as simple as that. The moment you allow one group of people/companies to have 24/7 access to politicians and yet the general population only gets to vote every couple of years, you are effectively done with democracy.
Nothing you can do now but please remember this once/if the great reset is done 😁
I strongly disagree. All lobbying is wrong and could be considered bribery. At a minimum it is circumventing democracy. We see a case in front of us and see what happens in broad daylight, what you call bribery. Do you honestly belief this is a rare case or can we say this (lobbying) is not a transparent part of the process and thus an incentive to bribe/coerce politicians?
But I understand that the system is what it is atm and lots of people have been accustomed to it, up to the point of defending it.
Real lobbying is simply educating policy makers on the change you want to happen. You can’t reasonably expect every politician to be educated on every issue.
For example, my SO lobbied the state legislature about a bill that would keep parents out of prison for non-violent offenses.
Again, we’re talking about bribery masquerading as lobbying.
I know what lobbying is and what forms it can take. In the end it is all about influencing a political system by bypassing the electorate.
Lets take this statement of yours:
“Real lobbying is simply educating policy makers on the change you want to happen. You can’t reasonably expect every politician to be educated on every issue.”
And this is why you should have a well working and functioning government. Politicians are elected and should have a global idea on what to do for the populace, they elected them after all. The knowledge you refer to should not be completely on these politicians. They might have some, based on their life experiences and education. The continuity and knowledge should come from civil servants. They are the cement of government, the persons who make the wheels go around. Ok, cement and wheels do not go well together but you get the gist of it.
Listen, we are (or soon very likely) going around in circles. I understand that the current system of lobbying is what people know and expect, even rely on, see your example of your SO. Of course you see the benefit of a system which is used for centuries, millennia perhaps even. It is, in my view, a broken and infectious system, meant to overrule the will of the people. Brought to you by powers that want continuous access and influence in a government but in the disguise of “being helpful”.
I don’t know what to say or how to explain it anymore then I already did.
Lobbying by definition can be verbal. However lobbying law allows for financial contributions as long as they’re disclosed. That’s what they’re speaking against. It legally puts the power of our government in the hands of those with the deepest pockets.
They’re getting smarter about this. Instead of charging Trump immediately they’re saving him for after all his conspirators are convicted. They know that Trump will leave his people out to dry if he thinks it won’t impact him, and by leaving Trump out of it the guilty verdicts become significantly easier to achieve. Once they’ve got a whole slew of air tight convictions to point to their case against Trump becomes really simple because they just need to show be was working with all these people which is practically a matter of public record at this point.
The very fact that Trump isn’t at 10% in the polls means maybe we need articles like this.
But on the other hand: if you were somehow better off in March 2020, does that make voting in fascism any more sane? Is there anyone who was doing well enough in March 2020 that they are ethically absolved from destroying the country in 2024? Even writing this as a thought exercise suggests it’s worth asking, but it just isn’t.
Maybe, just maybe, the media needs do stop with this horse-race business-as-usual reporting. His entire game is borrowing legitimacy. As “successful businessman,” “celebrity,” “presidential candidate,” “president,” he’s just gutting any meaning from each title and wearing its decaying death mask to keep up the con, the legitimacy ponzi scheme. Stop playing that game.
Yup. FCC abandoning the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan is what brought us sensationalism in broadcast news. Instead, it should have been expanded to cover anything using the term like “news” and “current events”, similar to other protected terminology like “professional engineer”. Cable news never being covered by FD was also ridiculous.
Testing the boundaries?! No, he is blatantly violating corruption laws. He is asking for a quid pro quo, you do this for me and I’ll do that for you.
John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the USA defined corruption as “a contribution to a particular candidate in exchange for his agreeing to do a particular act within his official duties.”
I think what @ThePyroPython is trying to say is that if Trump wins, the odds of oppression by the alt-right are pretty high.
Keep in mind that Biden got put into office because of people in states willing to do the right thing.
Many Secretaries of States have already indicated that they won’t certify elections if they feel that there may have been issues and we all know that they are going to be “issues” if Biden wins.
We’re literally, not figuratively, facing the death of democracy this November.
Don’t forget downballot in your state races either. The supreme court basically made partisan gerrymandering legal, and racial gerrymandering legal if you can pretend it’s just partisan gerrymandering. So this could be the last slew of elections where you may have a fair shot in many states.
This article is an important read. Vought is behind a large portion of Project 2025, and assisted Trump in finding ways around our system in his last term. He is clever and dangerous. Trump is keeping distance from him and the project during his campaign, but you can be sure he’ll be right back in Trump’s cabinet if he wins in the fall.
The Trump campaign has distanced itself from the extensive planning. Campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement, “Unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.”
The trick is for a coalition of independent journalists to find irrefutable evidence of the connection in early September so it has a chance to cycle out of the news before someone smacks Trump with it in October. It needs to be new enough to be remembered, old enough to not be linked, and disconnected from either party enough to seem unbiased. It won’t mean a damn thing to the right, but it might be enough for questioning moderates.
Yea, this is precisely what I suspect they’ll try so uh… expect some Project 2025 opinion pieces in the NYT in mid-september. And then we’d likely see some direct questions, in theory Trump might be concerned about rejecting Project 2025 because it’d alienate his base, but the outcome Democrats would be hoping for is for him to embrace it.
The NYT will probably also write a bunch of galaxy brain stuff about #BidenSoOld and gEnOcIdEjOe to even anything out for the horse race/good people on both sides…
So Earth had been slowing down until 2016. There have been no leap seconds added since then. Due to the ice melting at the polar caps the weight is off at top and bottom and that land has been rising, making Earth more spherical. This has led to the Earths speeding up in its rotation. They’re saying we might have to add an inverse leap second, or rather just subtract one.
I’d read a few years ago, there’s a particular industry that has become very dependent upon the atomic clocks that are attached to the GPS system. That industry is finance. Now, we’re not talking about your check clearing for your car payment, but rather immense transfers of money. The article discussed how one or two seconds of interest on your mortgage payment is nothing, but once you start getting into corporate buyout amounts, you’re talking about real money. I’m sure the money people will find a way around this issue and account for any differences in calculations. What are you going to do if one country decides, out of whatever kind of stupidity, to not add a leap second or remove one?
If you want to participate in a financial or other business system, you need to observe their timekeeping system, which is generally UTC. If you say “well OUR country is using domestic time”, that’s fine, but business is still going to be conducted in UTC. You can use that clock, or use your own and risk things happening at the wrong time. Kind of like when you’re in different time zones and forget to account for that and show up to a party an hour late.
But the real thing is high-frequency trading. Instead of buying and selling days, weeks, or longer periods apart, trades are made with large sums based on market movements in milliseconds. If you can see that a stock is jumping upwards by a few cents over a short time, that doesn’t sound like much, until you put $1,000 on a 1% gain and make a quick $10. That doesn’t sound like much, but do that thousands of times a day, every day, and you can make a lot of money.
milliseconds? We are in the nanosecond now. 10-20ns round trip on 10G or 25G card, in a server which is in the next room of NASDAQ servers to minimize transfer time. Doing millions of transactions per second.
When a packet is received on the RX line, decoded byte per byte (yes, at 25GBps), a packet is sent at the same time on the TX line byte per byte, when the RX byte with the price is decoded, the FPGA determine if you should sell/buy and send the TX byte accordingly on the bus. This takes nanoseconds.
I don’t actually work in that space, so I was being conservative with my scales, but I figured it’d be something like that. I didn’t know they were doing it on FPGAs now though!
Are you saying the world literally revolves around bankerbros? Well then if 2 pm becomes the middle of the night that’s just the price we all have to pay to protect the profits of our bankerbros.
No matter how much we would like to completely ignore the existence of the stock market & banker bros the fact is that these greedy fucks thirst for profits so keenly that the can completely fuck up economies and send ripples across the world that affects everyone.
For example the GFC (caused by banks/finance institutions taking risks causing a total collapse when the gambles didnt pay off) which we are still affected by today to an extent.
Their insatiable need to make just that extra %profit can affect whether some random family in another country can put food on the table.
So yeah i agree, anything to make life harder for the ones who take advantage of us.
I don’t even want to know what kind of programming headaches will happen from going back in time. It’s hard enough programming time sensitive systems to work going forward in time only
Nope. It’s only double jeopardy if it happens in the same jurisdiction. A Federal trial would mean federal charges, which aren’t the same as state charges. Not the same charges, not double jeopardy.
Lobbying donations are legal in order to keep the money exchange transparent, specifically so officials can be held accountable for quid pro quo exchange. What Trump reportedly said was exactly what’s not legal, promising eased regulations or preferential treatment in exchange for donations.
Considering the very common practice of lobbyists drafting up specific legislation for politicians to use, i dont think this is the case. Or at the very least has zero enforcement.
It’s not meant to stop it. It’s meant to make money exchange transparent so the law can hold them accountable more easily if they’re used in exchange of preferential treatment.
I’m not a fan of monetary exchange in lobbying either, but at least now we can see the exchange instead of it being under the table like it was before lobbying law.
Lol, a little difference between lobbying, and offering services for specific dollar amounts, that just happens to be SURPRISE!!! ILLEGAL. Shocker right? I know, republikkklowns just look the other way, rules for thee not for meeeeeeee.
Sway your vote? Man lobbyists hand you the whole prewritten legislation to sponsor for their money. Legal because its going to your election campaign instead of directly to you.
Im not just calling out hypocrisy, i mean it literally, they cant do anything about this because laws are very lenient for campaign donations. So if they actually want to stop this, they do actually need to make legislative changes.
I wish we had a way to simulate a universe in which the GOP gets every single one of its policies implemented. Then let it run like a Sim City level. Just to see what a dumpster fire it would be.
The reason states have more powers than the federal government is to test different methods of government and see what works best, then apply those lessons everywhere.
Turns out the red states consistently wind up much worse than the blue states. But they’re so brainwashed and poorly educated, they don’t learn from observing better outcomes elsewhere.
S&P downgraded its credit rating first from AA+ to AA in August 2014, due to a budget that analysts described as structurally unbalanced,[52] and again in February 2017 from AA to AA−.[53]
It bugs me that credit ratings follow the eBay review policy of “AAAAA+++++ excellent service!!!”
Shudder I remember those dark days…I despise my state for letting that even come to pass. I remember voting for someone else instead of Brownback for this reason.
Read about the simulation games this researcher conducted with groups who score high on his authoritarian-type personality scale versus those who don’t: theauthoritarians.org
TLDR: When the world is run by right-wing authoritarians, it ends in famine and nuclear war.
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