Terrorism is not an ideological choice, it is a military strategy employed by groups that do not have the means to fight a more traditional conflict.
Hamas uses “terrorism” but the IDF doesn’t need “terrorism” because it has tanks, advanced fighter jets and one of the most advanced and well armed militaries in the world. It can just slaughter innocent tens of thousands of Palestinians and claim it is doing “military operations” and the world media will shake their heads and agree.
I can certainly appreciate the point, but realistically what can he actually do? Israel have already shown that they don’t actually give a toss about what the US of A thinks.
Israel is literally existentially dependent on the US along multiple vectors including material military aid and diplomatic cover (especially now that they have made themselves a pariah state globally), this means that Biden has holds ALL of the leverage. Biden just has to actually demonstrate to Netanyahu he isn’t playing around, which Biden has being doing the opposite of.
I especially can’t stand that people keep treating it as a fact here that US voters are split 50-50 on Israel’s genocide to stop. The polling is clear, US voters with a decisive majority support Palestine and ending this genocide.
People in this thread asserting that most Americans support Israeli’s actions in this genocide rather than support Palestinians as a some kind of indisputable fact as part of their rhetorical arguments is a self fulfilling prophecy of attempting to manufacture consensus where it doesn’t exist.
So I think the irony is that if standing with Israel means he can win the election, it’s still a better outcome for Palestine than if he loses. If he loses the election, Trump will tell Israel to just go ahead and glass the area.
The irony is how much you have twisted your political beliefs to find a position you feel ok about this from.
The majority of Americans think what Israel is doing is heinous and want it to stop, the idea that Americans are evenly divided on this is not grounded in reality.
I will vote for Biden when he genuinely stops the genocide, until that point I really don’t care what silly political posturing and shuffling around of bombs in warehouses and on logistics sheets Biden does. Even if we stop providing weapons right now of any kind, the entire apparatus of the IDF and indeed Israel itself is dependent on the US military industrial complex, the fact that Biden has not used that leverage to stop this genocide of Palestinians means he is complicit.
Genocide is my red line, and if Biden is going to be windy washy about coming back over that red line don’t blame people like me for not being satisfied.
The BLM protests did work, they exposed that the US is a violent police state where voting doesn’t actually do anything to change whether we live in a violent police state because both the Republicans and centrist Democrats will collaborate as much as needed to betray their voters in order to sustain the system of policing and prisons.
The fact that in the wake of George Floyd a lot of cities and municipalities actually went more draconian with their policing laws in backlash is only an indicator of a failure of the BLM protests if you don’t look closer, step closer and you see the truth is far scarier, the BLM protests did massively change the psyche of America, it’s just that actually has no effect upon policy making because democracy is so broken in the US to the extreme point where many city governments chose to actively do their opposite of the will of the people as a show of force and a chilling warning to leftists.
Agreed, and the important thing to remember is that the shift in police to seeing the population they are policing as their enemy, and as universally dangerous in black and poor areas, has been accelerating for decades.
The other side (police, the prison industrial complex and the 1% who employs these thugs) is already very clear about this this being Us vs Them, but the general US population was still pretty heavily in denial about it up until BLM.
I’m mostly with you, but if I tried to exercise and my legs broke, it’d be kinda wild to say the exercising “worked” because it exposed my shitty, unhealthy knees
I mean I think where I disagree with this mapping of the metaphor is that it isn’t a personal failing or problem, BLM was one of the biggest protest movements around police violence ever.
Far far worse is the simple fact that our chances of stopping Israel’s genocide go to zero under Trump. You think a Republican administration will stop it if you protest? At least with Biden you know it works and you know you can make a dent.
Why are you lecturing me about this? Stop wasting your breath on me.
It is very simple, if Biden wants my vote and votes from people like me, he can stop the genocide in Palestine.
So you’ll do what instead? Vote for Trump? Not vote? Throw away your vote to a 3rd party? What a naive and dangerous viewpoint.
I am not the naive and dangerous person here, there isn’t anything I have to do or have to stop doing.
Biden is the one who is directly enabling a genocide being committed by an “ally” that the US has an immense amount of material and political leverage over. Biden is the one throwing away his campaign because Israel getting unilateral ability to do and say whatever it wants is apparently more important to centrist democrats than winning elections (even though Netanyahu has continually spit in Biden’s face).
Sad to see your “red line” isn’t electing a dictator, because that’s what will happen if Trump wins. Spare me any twisted logic of how that’s not what would happen in your scenarios.
Spare me your liberal crocodile tears about how this is all progressives fault for having a red line at “genocide”. It is the job of a presidential candidate to convince voters to vote for them, in a normal election with a normal shitty centrist democrat candidate I would be fine helping them win even though they always shit on progressives helping get them elected the entire time.
Nah, I’ll sit this one out, I’ll call Biden “Genocide Joe”, this has gone wayyyy too far and honestly the coalition of progressives with centrist democrats is kind of dead at this point. Y’all think we are going to show up to make the DNC’s grassroots fundraising and key canvassing in important states work? We are the ones with energy, with ideas, with policy knowledge, and Biden just put us in a position where we have to violate our morals at a serious level to do the work to get Biden elected and guess who’s fault that is?
Guess who has the power to remedy this schism among Democratic voters?
No matter that Biden is himself simply does not have the power to unilaterally stop Israel’s actions?
He literally does, Israel cannot function as a state without an immense amount of US diplomatic cover, weapons, and fucktons of money.
Biden can stop it right this genocide in a matter of minutes by calling up Netanyahu and telling him it is over, full stop. I am sorry but I will not vote for a candidate that behaves this way.
Netanyahu just told Biden to take a hike. Thus, “full stop” disproving what you have said.
Netanyahu will say whatever he wants on tv, the Israeli military industrial complex is utterly dependent upon the US military industrial complex. Netanyahu has no play here and everybody knows it except apparently Biden (or maybe he just doesn’t care I don’t know, it honestly doesn’t matter at the end of the day, action matters).
We can limit the harm by putting pressure on an administration - and, crucially it is working to some degree.
Cool so what me and other people who have had enough genocide and think similarly are going to do is loudly tell Biden (which we are doing) that we want to vote for him, but we can’t unless he stops the genocide of Palestinians. Words are meaningless, small concessions are meaningless, he needs to stop the genocide NOW.
It appears at this point, this is the only way leverage will work because centrists democrats have proven thoroughly how cynically they see progressives and the ideologies they base their politics on. Crucially, I didn’t create these conditions where this is the only place progressives feel they have power in this coalition, centrist democrats like Biden did. I don’t accept the blame for that, I have always made it very clear I hope that genocide is a red line for me as a voter, full stop.
I appreciate that for you this may be a chance you are willing to take. I have trouble understanding why anyone would feel that way given the systemic issues of undermining US support for Israel that mean we cannot “stop the genocide” anyway. But thank you for having this dialog.
I understand you feeling that way. I feeling strongly about my position and I will not budge from it because it is founded in my beliefs, I can’t just see this as a tactical decision divorced from the aspect of me as a citizen directly endorsing probably one of the worst genocides in my lifetime (happening with my countries bombs, my countries military training, likely with military advisors from my countries military heavily assisting every level of this genocide).
This is a prototype for a darker future of mass scale violence against groups of people, for example how many US police departments have trained directly with the IDF, the entity that is slaughtering innocent civilians left and right in Gaza? The answer is a lotttt of them. This is a prototype and this is a test and if we do not reject this genocide with an existential disgust and fervor and a willingness to walk away from this voting coalition that benefits us in the near term, the prototype will have been demonstrated to be successful to the ruling class and that future should scare the shit out of you.
Shame on us for being afraid to defend our value because corporate democrats have set up an impossible choice and then argued for progressives to choose them by attacking them rhetorically.
I appreciate that for you this may be a chance you are willing to take
I don’t see this as be willing or not willing to take a chance, I see this as there being no choice in the first place. This is a moment where it’s “ride or die”. Biden can put his chips on the table and prove he treats progressive voters as genuinely part of his core voting bloc. Or he can keep assuming that young progressives will fall in line no matter what and in my opinion that is equally as catastrophic of an outcome if we just fall in line and agree to sweep Biden’s despicable enabling of the mass scale slaughter of 70,000? Palestinian men, women and children (we don’t even know the real numbers because Israel has killed all the journalists it can get its hand on in Gaza).
Now is the time to wield our power, now is the time to shut this shit down. There is no next time, no “we just have to vote for Biden here and then we can do the good work later”. If Biden refuses to budge on this, we have already lost and centrist democrats leveling the blame for that at people like me is lazy and frankly absurd.
I want to vote for Biden and I will, as soon as he calls up Netanyahu and tells him this genocide is over, period. I am not being a troll, if Biden takes serious action and stops this genocide then he immediately gets my vote. Very simple calculation for Biden here.
It’s hilariously pathetic that a bunch of lawyers convinced the people at Nintendo to waste their time doing this shit.
There is zero percent overlap between janky Garry’s mod custom assets with Nintendo sales of their polished AAA games except to probably drive sales of Nintendo games to a degree.
Yeah probably but literally that is so fucking insulting to me that companies/copyright behave this way, the human brain is extraordinarily complex, the idea that seeing a character recreated in a sandbox by a 3rd party modder could “warp” my thinking about Nintendo characters or games is basically a slap in the face by Nintendo.
Like… if you see a dumb meme with Mario in it, do you think “huh, maybe I shouldn’t buy Nintendo games, Mario is tarnished forever for me” …?. No, and what makes me think that is *this bullshit. I will never give Nintendo money because of the way they behave like this.
I mean I have a steam deck so I have no reason to get a switch or anything so whatever no big loss.
Ok, the intelligence of the most average person I know is still plenty intelligent. I don’t only know geniuses or something, it’s just I don’t feel like the normal human beings I encounter on a daily basis are deficient in intelligence. What makes people awful is usually their beliefs not their intelligence.
The human brain is FARRRRR too powerful of a biological adaption to get manipulated so transparently in this way by imagery in one context with imagery in another. It is an absurd ask to say that people would be “dumb” enough for their brains to do this and no except in neurodiverse cases (which is cool!) the human brain doesn’t work like this.
If your child is too young to understand parody or irony (or just get that when you say “somebody copied your favorite character and is using them in a way that isn’t genuine to the character”) why the hell are they being exposed to…. Garry’s Mod?
It doesn’t matter where you live, we are all the same species of animal and the brain in our skull that we like to lament as stupid when we make general statements about the intelligence of the public around us is an extraordinary thing.
I get people’s cynicism and I am kind of annoyed people think I live in a fairytale lol, I just see humans around me trying to live their lives and being mediocre humans…. and the intelligence of mediocre humans is nothing to dismiss.
People are smart as fuck, conservative and hateful ideologies do make people behave like idiots but I mean I don’t fault the human brain for getting brainworms when the brainworms are firehoused (one might say trickling down at a rapid rate) at everyone by the wealthiest people in the world 24/7.
Also yo are you seriously looking for me to give you the average IQ of the population around me? This feels like two steps from getting out calipers and measuring people’s skulls to determine their intelligence. I agree, let’s NOT stick our heads in the sand.
Look at how much work that sentence is doing! Damn, you just shut down several entire categories of science and culture devoted to understanding what intelligence is in all its complex varieties of form, well done!
Please come back after you’ve worked in any customer service position interacting with the general populace. Plenty of smart folks out there, but just as many people that absolutely are not.
I have, people are enraging sometimes but also people are fucking stressed as hell these days, I think overall people try to get along as best they can, even when working customer service where you meet insane people and need to rant about them after work because it breaks your brain how stupid they are from your perspective…. but that is life, a lot of people are hurting at least in my country (US). I don’t blame people for falling apart or making stupid choices because they don’t have the energy or alacrity left in their bodies after work to function.
Yeah there are assholes, I am not some naive fool who trusts everybody, but I am sorry I just aggressively don’t agree with this endlessly repetitive narrative that the average person is a lazy, dumb piece of shit. I know people like that, but the real ones, who could have lived a much easier life but chose to be an asshole just because, are actually pretty rare.
Plenty of people are landscapes of trauma (like me) even just from the trauma of always being stressed about money, and I just don’t feel like when that pushes people to do stupid irrational things that that really is an indicator those people were stupid, morally deficient or lacking in industriousness.
I never said I thought everything was ok? My point is that things are not ok for reasons that have nothing to do with people being too stupid, it is a lazy lament with no foundation in reality in terms of describing why people are suffering.
German teenagers and young adults find themselves increasingly unsatisfied and likely to vote for the far right, according to a survey. Fears about prosperity are highlighted as a possible cause....
I know I am throwing stones in glass houses because I am saying this as a person from the US, but wow Germany is a really scary country, it seems like the culture is always extremely primed to radicalize its young men into serious violence around an obsession with masculine and machine strength/purity.
The US is a scarier country in most respects, and certainly has the same issue, but Germany is a much older culture and these brainworms seem to have ingrained deeper into their cultural mindset in some ways.
Are leftist movements growing to a similar degree among young people in Germany?
Right wingers like you supporting UBI is how I know it will just be used as a bait and switch to slash social welfare programs because “now we have UBI!” but UBI won’t be anywhere enough to actually support people and it will get purposefully jammed by the rich in a position of not providing enough money and not rising with inflation.
Right wing people getting excited about UBI honestly tells you everything you need to know, it is a “solution” to the class war going on that doesn’t require recognizing ANY of the actual politics involved in the class war nor how the rich won’t voluntarily give us anything unless we organize to the point that we scare the shit out of them.
UBI in the current political reality is a facade of a solution that doesn’t require an honest conversation about the problem, which explains exactly why conservatives like it.
To be fair, war is actually a lot like gambling, most of the time it is boring sameness run through with a constant low level anxiety and then when something changes it happens abruptly with no warning. The difference is that when the unusual punctuates the boredom and you win in gambling you get money but when the jackpot sounds on the slot machine of war and something unexpected happens it usually means you are about to die.
It isn’t gambling for the rich though, more like the big loud distraction (that happens to kill lots of people) put on to distract everybody else from them robbing us all blind (on both sides of whatever war you can imagine).
Yes, WW1 was taught to me in school as coming out of a tense political situation that spiraled out of control before anyone knew what was happening, almost sort of like a freak natural disaster.
Everything made so much more sense when I read Gravity’s Rainbow with the way it portrayed the world wars as inevitable horrendous colonial violence turned inwards (which was bound to happen eventually). At first I was really confused why Pynchon included so much about the Herero peoples of Southern Africa, what did they have to do with WW2? Then I started to learn more history, I read the great article in the guardian on the 100th anniversary of WW1 about how the violence and genocide of colonialism was a direct path to the mass killing and violence of WW1
It’s actually ridiculously simple to not break the law or get in an accident.
Driving a car is absurdly difficult, incredibly dangerous, takes only a second of distraction to kill yourself and others and in general is such a nightmare that it is contrary to what you say a miracle that people aren’t crashing into each other all the damn time.
Like, everybody I have gotten in a car with for the past 10 years invariably will get stressed out significantly by the unavoidable chaos of driving enough to visibly become emotional about it even during a short drive. Driving is miserable.
I never said it didn’t suck, but it only sucks because other people are terrible drivers.
This is the least important reason driving sucks is because other people aren’t perfect at driving. The reasons driving sucks:
-1. There are wayyyyy too many cars on the road
-2. In order to try to solve 1, the entire landscape has been devoted to facilitating more and more cars which makes it depressing as fuck to go anywhere because where you are going is functionally the same as where you came from.
-3. Owning a car is absurdly stressful, massively stressful so everybody on the road at a minimum is stressed about making sure their car doesn’t fall apart and they can’t get to work.
-4. People spend massive chunks of their lives sitting in cars commuting to work for almost no reason, highways are filled with people everyday stopping and starting, stopping and starting over and over again in traffic using fossil fuels to move several thousand pound objects miles and miles all for nothing.
It isn’t absurdly difficult at all unless you’re incredibly incompetent
-5. This bring me to my last point. Just because it isn’t physically difficult to press the gas and brake pedals on a car and use the steering wheel doesn’t mean driving is easy in the slightest. It is one of the most difficult things human beings have ever been expected to do on a daily basis in terms of extreme life ending consequences for losing attention or control for only the briefest of moments. It isn’t hard to drive a car compared to say riding a horse, but driving a car is so mind numbingly frustrating and exhausting in modern life that there is a good chance one day you won’t be paying attention when that freak rare situation occurs and you need to respond instantly in order to not hit another several thousand pound object hurtling towards you with fragile humans inside (not to mention humans everywhere on the street, barely an arms length from your metal box traveling at lethal speeds).
Driving is extremely difficult, look at how stupendously self driving cars have failed to tackle the challenge even when we created AI opponents that can easily beat the best Go players in the world years ago. The fact that wayyyyyy more accidents don’t happen all the time is actually pretty incredible in terms of the daily volume of sustained, unbroken focus it takes from every single person driving to prevent more crashes.
Driving is easy in a way that it’s schematic and there are not many rules compared to say aviation
I just don’t agree with this, flying an airplane has got to be harder in a lot of ways but one way in which driving is more difficult is the the amount of things you can hit while driving and how easy it is to hit those things.
The entire point of an airplane is to get up into the sky so it doesn’t have to worry about hitting other things when it goes fast…
I’m sorry not hitting another flying object in an absolutely MASSIVE three dimensional space that is 99.99% empty is a trivial task next to driving through a busy city in essentially a two dimensional space (you can’t go above or below to avoid hazards) with high speed traffic going the other direction only inches away, abrupt requirements to stop when something pulls in front of you, a dizzying variety of cars, pedestrians, bicyclists and other hazards to keep track of and the constant pressing need to ALWAYS be ready to brake or steer violently in order to avoid crashing.
Also when air airspace does get relatively congested like say at an airport, there is usually a tower full of people who’s job it is to route traffic so all you have to do is follow their directions and communicate effectively. You don’t have to make instantaneous choices like someone trying to get to an exit across 5 lanes of busy highway traffic that isn’t letting them in.
Let me put it this way, with an airplane cruising on a level flight path, how long could the pilot let go of the controls and ignore the environment around them before they hit something? That is a difficult question to answer, it could be 10 minutes… it could be more (assuming the aircraft can maintain a cruise speed and level flight). With a car, the answer is simple, it takes no more than 3-5 seconds of ignoring the environment around you and letting go of the controls to hit something. At highway speeds the difference of a second or two can determine if you collide head on with another vehicle at a combined velocity of 120+ mph.
An airplane pilot rarely is put in a position as risky as driving a car unless they are acting extremely irresponsibly. The rules of flying set out to make it so the pilot ideally never needs the kind of split second reactions that driving requires on a day to day basis (except for perhaps during landing).
The numbers support my claims too, flying is BY FAR AND AWAY safer than driving a car. It isn’t even close, driving is by the numbers extremely dangerous compared to everything else we are required to do in order to live our lives.
It’s far easier to get to the grocery store without hitting anything with the car than it is to, say, pass the first level of Super Mario Bros.
Then why don’t we let kids who can beat Super Mario Bros in their sleep (and thus from your perspective have demonstrated the skill required to learn how to drive) drive cars?
Again just because it is easy to aim the steering wheel and press the gas peddle doesn’t mean that every time you so much as drive to the grocery store and back you aren’t literally doing the most dangerous (mandatory) activity in most adult’s lives (both in terms of risk to yourself and risk of killing or hurting others).
If you don’t start yelling at somebody or something within 10 minutes of getting in the driver seat you are in the vanishing minority of drivers. Are you some kind of monk?
I> A person can actually, literally, control whether their car hits anything. It’s a solvable problem.
That is a really silly way to look at car accidents and the tragedies that come out of them. Just because you could rewind time and change what the drivers were doing to avoid a crash happening doesn’t really mean anything about the inherent risk factors to driving. Accidents are going to happen, we live in the real world not the one in which people behave consistently and perfectly and freak unexpected situations never happen.
Further, most people HAVE to drive their car in order to live their life on a daily basis (getting to work and back being the most obvious need). Driving isn’t a choice for most people at least in the US, so people are absolutely always going to be driving when they really don’t want to or aren’t at their most alert. It is just something we have to do sometimes in order to make ends meet in our lives.
I disagree. It’s like a gun. There’s negligence, but “true accidents” I’m not sure if I buy it.
No, you can walk around with a gun, even with it cocked and so long as you keep your finger off the trigger the likelihood of an unavoidable or unforeseen accident is still fairly low. A gun is an inert object that must be compelled to become lethal by the pressing of a trigger. A 5000 pound SUV on the other hand, by simply moving at normal driving speeds in close proximity to other people, consistently presents lethal opportunities that the driver must actively take steps to prevent from becoming realities.
A gun and a car are almost precise opposites in that respect. A car is like a gun that periodically aims at someone and automatically begins a firing sequence and you have to be paying attention enough to actively intervene and stop it.
For the vast majority of Americans having a car is a mandatory part of having a job?
I can’t remember the last job I applied to that didn’t ask specifically whether I had a drivers license and car.
Yes, owning a car is mandatory at least in most places in the US. I don’t like it, but to believe otherwise is a strange distortion of the reality for most.
Conservatives who use religion (or other ideologies) as an excuse to bludgeon their fellow citizens into power structures that hurt them are a constant across the universe and are present in all species, and they use the same exact script that must have been distributed sometime before the evolution of intelligent life and has remained unchanged for eons. Expect these people. Without fail every beautiful punchbowl you encounter and make first contact with will have these turds floating around in it just itching for an opportunity to sabotage negotiations with the federation.
I mean I get it, auto-aim can be frustrating, especially if you can’t find a game you like that doesn’t have it, but on the other hand a bit of good auto-aim de-emphasizes just being extremely good at aiming which makes every other aspect of the game more important and satisfying to master, which I think you can make a good argument for being a good thing when it is done right.
Of course you shouldn’t but there is a categorical difference between the risk of a corporation exploiting you because of a power imbalance (you want to use Reddit, there aren’t alternatives in this hypothetical scenario) and the rando running your fediverse instance abandoning the project or being weird about your data.
The second category can definitely be problematic, but it just isn’t the same level of awfulness and systematic exploitation that corporations wield every day to extract a profit.
It sounds like a weird statement because we have been trained to think the average “other” we will encounter in society as dangerous, but if you actually think about the statistics then yes absolutely it makes way more sense to trust a random person or handful of people to run your instance than a corporation. Publicly traded corporations are legally required to be assholes in the pursuit of profit, on the other hand most of the time randos usually aren’t assholes, though to be safe you should always be cautious as you say.
Sure it could happen, but I don’t understand what relevance that has when you compare it to the fact that you KNOW without a shadow of a doubt corporations are going to sell your data to the maximal amount they can, even if it is illegal.
Besides this isn’t about our data being sold or not being sold really (our data will be mined and sold by somebody so long as it is publicly available on social networks), it is about who has the power and who doesn’t. Does a single corporation run by a billionaire fascist-baby have the power or an imperfect constellation of developers, instance maintainers and moderators?
I don’t have it, I think it changes up the game quite a bit and thus is more geared for someone who has played the shit out of the base game.
I do think Slay The Spire and Monster Train are basically must buys for the genre as boring of answer as that is. They both just have so much depth to their mechanics, and depth of mechanics is everything in this genre.
Even Biden’s Lawyers Are Urging the White House to Change Course on Gaza (theintercept.com)
Seems legit (lemmy.today)
Biden says US won't supply weapons for Israel to attack Rafah, in warning to ally (apnews.com)
Nintendo forces Garry's Mod to delete 20 years of content — Garry confirms Nintendo is behind Steam Workshop purge | Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
Nintendo is literally a depressing company right now…
Pessimistic young Germans turning to far right, says study (www.dw.com)
German teenagers and young adults find themselves increasingly unsatisfied and likely to vote for the far right, according to a survey. Fears about prosperity are highlighted as a possible cause....
Seattle gave low-income residents $500 a month no strings attached. Employment rates nearly doubled. (finance.yahoo.com)
A Seattle basic income pilot gave low-income residents $500 a month, nearly doubling employment rates....
Dwarf Fortress - Adventure Mode Beta Out Now (store.steampowered.com)
99% of Gamblers stop before they Rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Polls show Trump winning key swing states. That’s partly a failure of the press (www.theguardian.com)
Polls can’t predict – but they can warn. And I’m not sure our horserace-obsessed media are heeding the warning...
car insurance (sopuli.xyz)
What's your favorite J.L. and the Dees song? (lemmy.world)
The cast of Deep Space Nine (lemmy.world)
[PyottDesign] Ultimate FPS Controller Design and Build (www.youtube.com)
Reddit started blocking VPN users on old.reddit.com (lemm.ee)
At this point, I’m not even going to bother trying to go on there anymore.
Steam Deckbuilders Fest (store.steampowered.com)