I’m ultimately glad, he was giving democrats a bad name. We could afford that a decade ago, but we no longer can.

There’s a mild reshuffling of the parties happening, with the Tulsi Gabbards switching to red and the Adam Kinzingers switching to blue, and I’m fine with it. It’s about priorities. Which parts of your platform and beliefs are more important than the other parts?

There’s around 2 million Gazans still alive. That’s a lot of ethnicity still to be cleansed if cleansing is the goal.

I didn’t say 330 million registered voters. I said 330 million people, as in total population of the country including all nonvoters and ineligible.

At any rate, I don’t think any singular factor dominated, each person has their own mix of issues. Economy was a big one, including things like rent prices that the feds have little control over in our system. Gaza was a smaller one, definitely. There’s at least a dozen more.

Polls cannot really accurately capture this, they’re too clumsy a tool. Focus groups can though.

There are around 50 million registered dems in the country and Harris is currently sitting at around 70 million votes. Our problem is everyone else in a country with 330 million people.

On the arms shipments, we may try lawsuits via the Leahy Law if the ethnic cleansing ramps up. The way the law is written, it actually looks at arms shipments all the way down to the granular level of individual military units. It does not say arms cannot be exported to countries engaging in war crimes, it specifically says individual military units that commit war crimes cannot receive arms. If they choose to engage in a broader campaign of organized displacement out of Gaza or starvation in places where combat has largely died down, a larger number of military units could potentially become implicated, which could maybe make a lawsuit more feasible. We’ll have to see.

Regarding AIPAC, since Citizen’s United determined that monetary donations are a form of speech, this requires either an amendment or recapture of the Supreme Court. Otherwise Americans are allowed to lobby the government for whatever they wish, even if they are doing so at the behest of a foreign government. They have to disclose that, but so long as they do, they are simply exercising their Constitutional rights as perceived by the current Supreme Court. This isn’t going away any time soon, the current law is very clear and pretty much ironclad, rooted in the Constitution itself via the Bill of Rights.

Some good answers already. To add, in the media sphere Pod Save America and their related branches is a liberal progressive media organization that tries to run counter to the conservative media ecosystem, trying to ride the line between policy wonkery and approachability.

Keep the faith, Brits. Perhaps Brexit washed some of the insanity out early enough that the far right continues to struggle there.

Hopefully we’re not slowly returning to the Napoleonic Era, I’m not sure you guys could withstand all of continental Europe a third time.

So, if I authentically offer to kick his nuts up into his stomach that’ll be enough for him to him to like me? He has literally zero opinions on what actually might be a good or bad idea for the country, just so long as I say it with gusto?

I do get it, but I find it pretty outlandish. If he was born in Mad Max Fury Road, would he just be perfectly happy being one of those pole guys? They seem very authentic, look like they’re having a blast too. “Witness me!”? When I see drug cartels and their quest for money and power, they seem very authentic about it. Very authentically killing everyone who crosses them.

Not gonna lie, that’s a problematic value system.

edit: Should also make him damn leery of Trump, if he has any sort of real instincts about people. Rich assholes are not bottomless wells of authenticity.

Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary and then voted libertarian

…wat?

I kind of understand Bush vs Kerry. Bush had a vision. It was a crazy neocon vision, but it was a vision and he used it to communicate effectively enough that we still occasionally meme about bombing people into freedom.

Obama had a clear vision, and communicated it well. Hope, prosperity for the middle class, international leadership. Biden had a vision, a less divisive America where we came together and worked on overdue problems. Hilary didn’t really, nor did Kerry or Gore. They were more policy administrator types who focused on specific policies and administration, and the idea of incremental improvement just didn’t resonate with people.

Trump, for all his failings, does have a vision he is capable of communicating to the American people. Harris did too, better than Hilary anyway, but it didn’t really come online until fairly late into the campaign and stayed a little too nebulous. I do think she was hurt in this regard by getting such a short campaign with no real prep time, she was evolving in the right direction.

I think we need a Bernie or AOC, someone with a powerful vision and ability to clearly communicate it, to the point of literally cudgeling people over the head with it. And we need to vote them in during the primary, over any competent administrator types, despite the fact that we are fully aware of how effective and necessary those policy administrators can be. Our valuing of them is a place where we’re out of touch with the broader American electorate though.

edit: MLK Jr was good at this. He had a dream, and it was a simple one that any person could visualize in their head. It didn’t require any policy expertise to understand it. We need that.

Actually that was a JD Vance quote. Harris kept it more classy.

Either way, he’s more of a Mussolini type. Less vision, more opportunism.

I think you were really lucky, a pocket knife is a lot riskier than a can of mace or taser or something. Easy to take away. But if it’s what you got, then it’s what you got. Also should’ve aimed a little lower.

Yes, he took all our guns, too. Look, there’s none to be found anywhere.

No, they’ve been getting progressively crazier since 2016.

2000 was fairly divisive, it went to the Supreme Court after all. But it wasn’t even a fraction this dramatic, people mostly shrugged and figured GWB would be like his father, which was unfortunate, but sane at any rate. Nobody was really predicting 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.

2004 was pretty dull. John Kerry challenged GWB but felt sort of like an empty suit.

2008 was nice, Obama was a strong and exciting candidate vs the very known quantity of McCain, who was a moderate repub known for bipartisanship. Sarah Palin provided for hours of entertaining impersonations by people like Tina Fey, but since she was the VP candidate nobody really cared.

2012 was dull. Romney was a strong candidate, another moderate repub. But Obama was fine, he hadn’t broken the country or anything. Brought us out of a recession, even if people were upset about bank bailouts and stuff. Lot of people got health insurance.

Then it starts getting spicy.

Honestly for a portion of the ones here online, I don’t think they actually care that much about Gaza except as a convenient tool to attack Americans. It’s academic to them. I don’t expect it’ll stop once Trump is in, they’ll just switch to criticizing Americans overall. They’re mostly leftist agitators, and I honestly think they hate moderate progressives the most, since we’re trying to improve capitalism which makes it harder to undermine and destroy.

For people that actually do care, it’s a personal, emotional argument about not being able to feel good about it, which I understand. It’s a sort of trolley problem. If they don’t vote, they kinda just walk away and the trolley runs over a bunch of people, but they don’t have to watch and bear a sense of personal responsibility at that emotional level for being a part of it. It doesn’t actually benefit Gaza, but there’s only so much they could really do anyway.

Who was I pointing a finger at?

I think this is fairly accurate. Only major disagreement is on Ukraine, where Trump can cut off our aid, but cannot actually force the Ukrainians into any sorts of negotiations. As European production continues to increase, it’s not a foregone conclusion that US withdrawal will necessarily result in Ukrainian defeat. Lost ground, certainly, but Ukraine has quite a lot of ground and could continue to make Russia pay for their gains.

If you reread what I wrote, you’ll see that I was not saying the international community was responsible for the genocide.

Israel would quickly go the way of south africa without US support.

This is nothing more than faith. Israel trades with many countries, including India, where anti-Muslim sentiment is very strong among the ruling Hindu nationalists. US contributions are only a small fraction of their total annual budget. All they would really lose irreplaceably is advanced weaponry.

I somewhat agree, though I’ll point out people were doing quite well at the end of Clinton and Obama’s presidencies. They flipped to the other party anyway.

Actually, 90 dems boycotted that speech. This also deflects from my argument that the situation in Gaza is going to become far more dire in a few months.

To answer your question, though: You know how there’s around 2 million Gazans still alive? Starving and desperate, but still alive. It’s not just us, but the whole international community that is responsible for that, otherwise Netanyahu could’ve implemented his “General’s Plan” six months ago. Nothing except international leverage can maintain those lives. Leverage is not free, though, it must be purchased somehow. People do not just listen to you otherwise, unless they get something from it. While it would be theoretically possible to attempt sanctions, doing this to an ally during war would be political suicide domestically, resulting in a different administration and reversal of the policy. This would result in their eventual deaths anyway, simply after a delay.

Not that our current timeline is looking any differently, admittedly. But actually saving them is not nearly as simple as everyone seems to think, as if some total boycott of arms to Israel would somehow quickly lead to an Israeli military defeat. Advanced munitions are not necessary for a genocide, it can be done with napalm and the withholding of food. This would not be expensive. Nor are advanced munitions necessary for the continued survival of the IDF, which numbered around 400k strong in the initial stages of the war.

Defeating this genocide is unfortunately far, far harder than people make it out to be, due to a powerful faction of domestic support among American citizens and AIPAC lobbyists.