This is what people have been trying to say. Biden isn’t doing a great job, but Trump would be infinitely worse. If you actually care about the Palestinians instead of scoring political points, there’s a very clear choice who to vote for.
Not even just the people you love. This article makes it exceptionally clear that if you actually care about the Palestinians, Trump winning is the absolute worst case scenario.
I think this is more because of a population imbalance. Left voters are not numerous enough to be worth compromising for – on a purely numbers based assessment. The middle is a larger and more reliable voter base.
But, I think that’s going to change over the next few decades. Progressives and further left people are becoming an increasingly important and large voting bloc. Numerically it will soon make sense to compromise leftwards to get more votes than compromising with the center. We’re just not there yet.
Israel is sure doing their best job to try and make that the prevailing attitude. And frankly, I don’t know that I disagree anymore. Get the civilians out of harms way, and then wipe out the government and the IDF, alongside Hamas.
The Dems are a right to far right party by any normal countries standard.
Except on social issues, but who cares about those? And they used to be left of European parties when it came to immigration, but they’ve recently moved closer to the xenophobic European position. Oh and they’re very clearly left of Labour now too.
By the way, would you like to clarify what you mean by “normal countries”? I’m assuming here that you meant European, since that’s generally what people mean, but it’s pretty fucked up to say that normal = European, don’t you think?
Can they just shut the fuck up already and end their war? They’re just firing wildly and killing Palestinian civilians, hostage Israeli civilians, and even themselves! Occasionally they’re getting a member of Hamas.
Just fucking throw in the towel and take the L. Part of me this at this point that Netanyahu is partially prolonging the war because he wants Democrats to be divided and Trump to win so he has an even friendlier US.
Why do the good die young, and the evil live forever?
What a complete and total coward. She did do one good though – she showed that a sizable number of Republicans aren’t happy with Trump, and could be up for grabs in November or just might not vote at all.
Pretty much. The intersection of gender and sexuality spectrum means romantic attraction, sexual attraction, and sexual interests can mix and match in a lot of ways.
He’s apparently an idiot, since every time Democrats haven’t won, the entire country has been dragged right.
Immigration is an interesting example of this. Funny enough, when Democrats were in power, policy trended further and further left with amnesty for dreamers and accepting refugees. After losing in 2016, the Democrat position has moved towards stronger enforcement and border security.
If Lawrence has not changed his mind since then, he’s a giant fucking idiot who doesn’t see reality. The problem with not voting for Democrats is that it means Republicans win, and they have a habit of moving all issues to the right.
You want the party to move left? Elect more progressives. Understand why voters are picking moderates over progressives in primaries, and course correct. It isn’t dark money, because there’s been plenty of that thrown around, and fake progressives have had more on hand versus their primary opponents.
I think something we often forget is that people can have spot on analysis and very intellectual takes in the past, but it doesn’t necessarily mean their modern takes are also good. Sometimes that’s an inherent thing too because of changing times. People who criticized US actions in the cold war were likely right – but a lot of them have adopted the imperialist position today that Ukraine belongs to Russia and it should be a pawn between NATO and Russia, instead of a self sovereign country that makes its own decisions.
Makes you wonder a bit how things will develop in the future, but I digress.
I think there’s probably a tendency for a lot of well meaning people to blame Democrats because their civics knowledge is less than comprehensive. And I don’t blame them entirely for that, our education system isn’t great.
Iranian police have arrested more than 260 people, including three European citizens, on suspicion of spreading satanism, the state-run IRNA news agency reported Friday....
A nice reminder that we’d all be better off without Iran’s theocracy which supports terrorists for proxy fights. A democratic Republic by and for the Iranian people would be a major step towards lasting peace in the middle east
No I legitimately mean a democracy by and for the people. If they decide they want to be in opposition to the West, I’m totally fine with that. That’s the whole point of self sovereignty. I just want the people to decide their own fates, because by all accounts, the theocracy and misogyny and brutal crackdown on protests are not popular.
Oh that totally justifies attacking civilians and workers on cargo ships, good point! Poor brown people who aren’t related to the blockade should have to suffer to stick it to Saudi Arabia and the West.
It depends on how retaliation goes. If the side that’s attacked uses conventional weaponry, we’re all fine.
So basically if Russia starts using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, NATO could respond with a conventional invasion of Russia and be done before noon. There’s scenarios where the rest of the world is fine if Russia uses nukes. But there’s no scenario where Russia is fine if they use nukes.
The only leverage Russia has to prevent all of NATO from joining in militarily is nukes. Using a nuke removes that leverage.
Because Russia has been gradually conquering territory, not all at once. They create puppet states and take over land, then regroup and rebuild before attacking again. There’s a clear pattern of this with Georgia, Crimea, and now the whole of Ukraine. Each time prior, the international community wagged its finger and slapped sanctions. It’s generally accepted now that enough is enough, and it ends here.
It certainly doesn’t help either that Russia has been funding far right parties throughout the West who try to lift sanctions against Russia.
This is exactly what’s happened over the last few decades too. They take Georgia, then they wait and resupply. They take Crimea and launch a war in Eastern Ukraine, then wait and resupply. They thought they could take the entirety of Ukraine and repeat the pattern, but they’ve overplayed their hand.
I don’t know, I think Poland is in a “I wish a bitch would” mood. They could have it handled before the rest of the world even has a chance to respond lmao
NATO allies are inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, a move that would be another blurring of a previous red line and could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war....
Could you do us a favor and at least fight against the Tankies so we don’t have to deal with either of you? Or perhaps you are a Tankie, and have unironically becomes indistinguishable from far right trash.
If NATO and the EU left Ukraine as a non-aligned, neutral country, the Russians would have not invaded.
Too bad it isn’t NATO, the EU, or Russia’s decision who Ukraine is aligned to and who they favor. Get your shitty imperialism out of here. Ukraine can do what Ukraine wants to do and you just have to deal with it.
Russia screeched that an old colony would dare leave their sphere of influence and invaded. And in the process, they exposed themselves as a global laughingstock. Their military is pathetic and weak, just like their leader – a projection of strength hiding a feeble fool.
It doesn’t matter if the Russian military has even slightly improved in one aspect – which I highly doubt – because their ability to project military might is gone. No one will take their threats or military seriously anymore. Everyone knows they’re impotent.
I dislike doubting polls, but there’s just some odd stuff in here.
10% go for RFK Jr, and it’s equal siphoning from both parties? 10%?!
20% more people blame Biden for Roe being overturned than Trump?
They’re TIED with Gen Z voters? TIED?!
After the absolute thrashing that Republicans have received on abortion, only like 50% of women would break for Biden?
This is a poll of just the 5 key states, but this part of their methodology gives me significant pause as well: "To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. "
Emphasis mine. There could be a huge skew. And these results don’t make sense. The other NYT poll from several months ago was also incredibly unusual and had very weird findings – to the point that the Guardian wrote something was very fucky with the results.
This isn’t to say this can’t be what’s going on, but we need corroboration from other polling groups. And it isn’t summer yet, which makes polls rather inaccurate too.
TLDR: Something’s fucky, we need more information and to monitor this.
EDIT: I just want to use my bully pulpit here to say that my criticisms by no means disprove the poll results. There’s oddities, but that doesn’t make the results an impossibility. Don’t only give credence to criticism of polls. If someone has reasons they believe the poll is accurate, you should give equal attention to it. At the end of the day, we don’t know what the actual truth is, and we won’t until the election is over. Just remember that we don’t want to just win, we want to dominate. We want massive margins. And that means we need to see wins even in less than accurate polls.
My only critique is that I don’t think 2020 skew is valid anymore. After Dobbs, the landscape seems to have significantly changed. 2022 was predicted to favor Republicans by a strong margin, but it ended up being a tie pretty much. And a lot of special elections have had surprising results too.
My personal opinion is that polling methodology may have overcorrected for 2020, and we’re getting a picture now that’s skewed right, versus left from beforehand.
It’s really hard to say though. There weren’t a lot of great polls to start with in 2022, and special elections don’t have significant polling either. It’s a weird position where the only good data set we have is from 2020, but there have been so many changes in the national environment that we have reason to doubt the skews from 2020 are still valid. But at the same time, what else do we have? Vibes and feelings and anecdotes. And the engineer in me dislikes dismissing data in favor of vibes. It’s important to consider still I think, because none of this is infallible. But I honestly couldn’t tell you what the “right” outlook to have is. Maybe I’m onto something, but maybe I’m just letting optimism bleed into my better judgement.
To be clear, polling theory is totally valid and an established science within statistics.
But the challenge is always with methodology, because you can never get a perfect simple random sample. And the methodology here certainly seems terrible.
That’s the thing, we don’t know how they’re correcting for it, and if it is just a fudge factor. The issue is there’s more confounding factors that anyone could list which could be the culprit here.
A fudge factor is easy, but the wrong solution here. But the right solution is incredibly complex and difficult to even identify. In my field we can get away with using a timer instead of a precise calculation sometimes. That really isn’t an option for polls. I don’t favor the people trying to fix the models.
I don’t really disagree with anything you’ve said, it’s a very valid take – and you’re spot on about underestimating Trump but overestimating Republican cohorts in polls. My only qualifier there is that we don’t know if 2022 models were overtuned for only Republicans, or also Trump support.
I don’t know if we can take 2016 as representative of our current dynamic. I think it’s certainly more representative than 2020 however, but shifting populations and world/domestic events have had massive impacts.
In short? I don’t know which outlook is more accurate. What I can reasonably assert though is that the reality will be somewhere between the less optimistic and the more optimistic outlooks. Taking these poll results at face value is probably the better strategic option anyway to create pressure to go vote and campaign.
I agree though, we shouldn’t be totally dismissive of these polls. It’s fine to scrutinize and question them like I’ve said, but it shouldn’t take away from the very real possibility that these are correct. Oddities don’t create impossibilities.
Legitimately one of my favorite games. Incredible story, characters, and side quests. It’s also the only time I’ve actually felt like I was in a city when playing a game, they absolutely nail the environment and setting. It feels like a true city, not a video game city.
I’m not so sure. The purpose of the defensive weaponry is, well, defensive. Stopping civilian deaths.
With how things are now, I think it would only make things worse. Netanyahu isn’t going to pull back if the US stops giving defensive aid. And when civilians inevitably die, he’ll either shrug, or use it as further justification to continue.
In essence, it won’t have any effect. I think the best thing to do would be supporting Netanyahu’s opposition to launch a coup, with our support conditional on them withdrawing completely from Gaza and letting Palestinians form their own state.
Either way, there won’t be any progress until Netanyahu is out.
Netanyahu would not care. And a lot of their neighbors are on much friendlier terms with them than before even. Jordan helped with stopping the Iranian counterattack, and I believe a few other nearby countries opened their airspaces to the US and company as well.
In terms of actual hate, it’s really just Iran and Iranian linked militias. If the Iranian people successfully overthrew their theocracy, most of the threats would end to Israel. There’s been considerable unrest and protest in Iran lately.
The way I see it, it’s a win win opportunity. Help the Iranians retake control of their country, help Netanyahu’s opposition take control and make it conditional on them behaving. It should make the region significantly calmer and allow us to stop sending defense to Israel and instead rebuild Gaza.
Even worker and labor protection issues. That’s the entire reason in fact that US companies like to go with Chinese labor. It costs far less because the workers don’t get paid as much and don’t have the labor protections that Western countries do.
This is the one space where we should never stoop to their level. Kids are off limits unless they’re actual adults. Leave them out of it.
I’m really glad that Barron isn’t going to involve himself here, because I don’t want him to get sucked into this unless he decides it’s what he wants to do.
This is an interesting situation where I disagree personally but agree geopolitically. It’s strong for the domestic economic to keep US automakers competitive.
Yeah that is something that bothers me. A lot of the affordability isn’t necessarily because of lower quality imo, but because they pay shit wages. It’s why labor is cheaper in China and companies want to outsource there. They don’t pay their workers adequately or have the and level of workplace protections.
A conservative plan for Donald Trump’s potential transition into the presidency calls for dozens of prisoners to be executed, according to HuffPost. An 887-page plan by Project 2025, led by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, says that if elected, Trump should make a concerted effort to execute the remaining 40...
I can’t really disagree with you. The issue is we have reached the actual point where the current crisis dwarfs all others. Maybe I was just younger then, but it didn’t feel like we had such existential threats in the Bush and Obama years. I remember people said that Romney winning would be the apocalypse, but it’s laughable to say that would’ve been the case in hindsight.
I think what we can take heart in is that we’ve been seeing a gradual increase in progressiveness in the party. And not just a small constant increase, but a significantly growing one. There are a nontrivial number of Congressional members who are incredibly progressive, and they’ve shifted the mood of the party notably leftward. The Inflation Reduction Act was a historic level of climate spending, to the point that Europe felt pressured to pass similar legislation. And the IRA actually closed the corporate tax loophole too – large corporations raking in billions in profits now have to pay a minimum 15%, even if they could previously loophole their way to $0.
I wish things were faster. Gaza in particular has highlighted to me just how frustrating it is for things to only improve at a snail’s pace. And specifically with Gaza, I don’t think the progress is actually amounting to material changes.
We are seeing material changes in other areas though. Healthcare could be a hell of a lot better, but as someone who relied on Obamacare for a few years, things have actually improved for people. The important thing is that we don’t lose heart, and that we keep pushing for better. The US has a rich history of leftists persevering to accomplish women’s suffrage, civil rights, labor rights, and gay rights and equality. As long as we press forward, just like they did, we’ll be successful. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice and good.
If we could just bury the fascists for good, we could start to make serious progress.
I disagree. I’ve met plenty of people who are far left and are all in on working together to stop Trump. Don’t be swayed by the terminally online, vocal “leftists”. We don’t know if they’re even genuine people, and they’re assuredly the minority.
I don’t want to be judged based on a false stereotype, and I don’t think we should judge them on a false stereotype either. The far left is antithetical to Trump.
Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that Israel will stand alone and “fight with our fingernails” in defiance of US threats to further restrict arms deliveries if Israeli forces proceeded with an offensive on the southern Gazan city of Rafah....
Trump told donors he will crush pro-Palestinian protests, deport demonstrators | Speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, he said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror. (wapo.st)
Dockworkers Push Union Resolution to Block Shipment of Israeli Military Cargo (truthout.org)
Israel Threatens 'Severe Consequences' for Nations Who Recognize Palestine (www.commondreams.org)
Nikki Haley says she will vote for Donald Trump following their disputes during Republican primary (apnews.com)
Conservatives are freaking out because they learned that some animals are gay (www.lgbtqnation.com)
Morehouse Students Turn Their Backs, Walk Out of Graduation as Joe Biden Gives Speech (www.yahoo.com)
Iran arrests 260 people for spreading 'satanism and nudity' (abcnews.go.com)
Iranian police have arrested more than 260 people, including three European citizens, on suspicion of spreading satanism, the state-run IRNA news agency reported Friday....
Russia lacks 'numbers for strategic breakthrough' in Ukraine: NATO (www.euronews.com)
Moscow says it will keep pushing its offensive in Ukraine, though NATO doubts Russia has the resources to make a significant breakthrough....
Images leak of Valve's next game, and it's an Overwatch-style hero shooter (www.eurogamer.net)
Though the way the leaker describes it makes it sound more like a 3rd person MOBA than a hero shooter....
As Russia Advances, NATO Considers Sending Trainers Into Ukraine (www.nytimes.com)
NATO allies are inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, a move that would be another blurring of a previous red line and could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war....
Trump Leads in 5 Key States, as Young and Nonwhite Voters Express Discontent With Biden (www.nytimes.com)
Cyberpunk 2077 director thanks fans as the game hits a 95% positive review rating on Steam (www.eurogamer.net)
Name and shame: Pro-Israel website ramps up attacks on pro-Palestinian student protesters (www.reuters.com)
Chinese woman jailed for reporting on Covid in Wuhan to be freed after four years (www.theguardian.com)
Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan’s search for the truth during the early days of the pandemic was seen as a threat by the authorities...
Melania Trump reveals son Barron, 18, has pulled out of being a delegate nominating his father for president because he has 'prior commitments' (www.dailymail.co.uk)
Biden really, really doesn’t want China to flood the US with cheap EVs (www.theverge.com)
Conservative Plan Calls for Dozens of Executions if Trump Wins (www.thedailybeast.com)
A conservative plan for Donald Trump’s potential transition into the presidency calls for dozens of prisoners to be executed, according to HuffPost. An 887-page plan by Project 2025, led by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, says that if elected, Trump should make a concerted effort to execute the remaining 40...
‘We will fight with our fingernails’ says Netanyahu after US threat to curb arms (www.theguardian.com)
Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that Israel will stand alone and “fight with our fingernails” in defiance of US threats to further restrict arms deliveries if Israeli forces proceeded with an offensive on the southern Gazan city of Rafah....