I don’t like this rigged system with only 2 options. I will refuse this system by either abstaining, or voting 3rd party.

If you do that, you get the clown. You don’t have any real option at this current moment because the decision is now and there are only 2 options. If you refuse to choose, you get the clown.

I feel like, if we get the clown, it will teach the system a lesson or something. Perhaps then something will change and choices will be more palatable in the future.

If you choose the clown, there’s a very high likelihood that there won’t be a future for any of us.

I’m going with the clown.

I’m sorry, but you don’t understand how any of this works.

The terrorist Hamas organization is embedded in Gaza as the ruling authority. The only way to pry them out is to have fighting where they hide, which is in civilian buildings in Gaza. Hamas does that on purpose, so that the only way to fight them is to bomb Gaza buildings like hospitals. Hamas is trying to get as many of their own people in Gaza killed as possible, so people like you watch their tiktok propaganda and repeat their talking points. There were 4 million people in Gaza at the start of the conflict, and by Hamas’ own numbers, there have been about 1% total deaths including Hamas’ own warriors. In the US, we lost nearly that many people to Trump’s mismanagement of Covid-19.

Iran is bombing Israel with ballistic missiles. They did not issue warnings to civilians like Israel does, or use bombs of limited power like Israel does, or answer to the Western alliance like Israel does.

I know this doesn’t match your propaganda worldview, but the US is trying to reduce damage and prevent war in the region. What you call a “genocide” against Hamas-controlled territory is the tip of the iceberg of the damage to civilians that could spread if we let Iran and Israel go at each other with full-scale war, while Hamas continues to attempt to exterminate every Israeli on the planet.

The reason my elected officials like Biden don’t listen to your strategy, is that your strategy is paper thin and has no merit. They are busy trying to solve complex multi-actor problems with very serious repercussions, not consuming Hamas propaganda on tiktok.

Misinforming while talking about misinformation. Par for course around these parts.

No casualties from 180 Iran rockets for mainly 2 reason:

1. Israel is used to the bellicose nature of all their murderous neighbors, so they have a strong culture of bomb shelters. 10 million Israel civilians were on bomb shelter alert that day.

2. Israel had help from allies to defend from Iran’s rockets.

The US is on record as having shot down rockets that Israel couldn’t deal with. This is why we have our warships nearby, to protect civilians. And also why we are sending more anti-missile tech. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyv0ne41pzo

And it is said that Jordan used their tech to shoot down some Iranian rockets to help protect Israel’s civilians when they saw the trajectory of the rockets. This wouldn’t be a first for Jordan, they had to get involved in April against another Iranian attack https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/17/middleeast/jordan-walks-a-tightrope-after-downing-iranian-drones-and-missiles/index.html

Also, perhaps I missed it, but I did not catch in your comment any relief that Israel civilians were spared horrors thanks to the quick actions of anti-missile efforts. Somebody might mistake your rhetoric for that of the Hamas-indoctrinated fucktards around these parts that speak in Hamas talking points and celebrate terrorism and genocide when the target is Israel.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/13/politics/israel-iran-antimissile-system-us-troops/index.html

The US will send an advanced anti-missile system — and US troops to operate it — to Israel “to help bolster Israel’s air defenses following Iran’s unprecedented attacks against Israel on April 13 and again on October 1,” the Pentagon said Sunday.

Literally range defensive tools to save civilian lives. We are deploying anti-missile tech to prevent deaths from rockets, and we need to deploy the personnel trained to manage those advanced tools because they are needed now, not 6 months from now when locals can be trained to operate them.

Approximately 100 US troops are deploying to Israel to operate the THAAD battery, according to a US defense official. It is rare for US troops to deploy inside Israel, but this is a typical number of troops to operate the anti-missile defense system.

So which one is it? We want Biden to protect civilians in the region… or maybe not when the civilians being protected are people from Israel. Once again, the Hamas-indoctrinated tiktokers showing their colors.

Also, in case it’s getting lost in the fog of BS in this sub: Iran is literally shooting rockets at Israel cities right now. Real war-class rockets that Israel can’t stop reliably because their tech is not advanced enough for ballistics of this nature. Where are all the “Biden should protect the civilians” people now?

Trump is a miserable moron with terrible ideas. The only reason he wins is because of his negative campaigning. If he didn’t do any negative campaigning, he would have no following whatsoever.

While we are busy demanding to know in detail exactly how Harris plans to solve every issue of this country, Trump is out there flat-out making up statistics and boogeymen, inventing conspiracy theories about birth certificates and sexual climbing in politics, and using hate and racism dog-whistles to rally the worst of us.

I hope those of you that hold Harris to the highest standards will remember what you did when we are living in the Trump sewer you helped elect.

82-page policy plan from Harris, for the naysayers that somehow continue to pretend that the best candidate available to us this election supposedly has no positions

https://kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy-Book-Economic-Opportunity.pdf

The comment section for this type of posts is always such a shit show.

This is essentially saying 2 things:

1 - It’s insane that some here seem to think that to remain “independent” of politics you can abstain or vote third party to show your discontent for how slowly the Dems deal with Natenyahu’s BS. Your abstain or 3rd party vote does nothing to “move the Dems to the left” when in reality you are removing them from power to give it to Trump, who has already promised to triple down on helping Netanyahu achieve whatever he wants.

The election is happening right now. There’s no time and space to negotiate new candidates or parties. It’s either the disappointing Dems, or the christo-fascist GOP. The time for standing on principle was 3 years ago, or next year at the start of the new cycle. Today is about pragmatism - how close we can get to the desired outcome, and which of these parties is more interested in listening to your position moving forward. It should be abundantly clear that Harris is by a huge margin the better choice for your desired outcomes.

2 - The Israel operation in Gaza, that we all want to stop, is not something that can be just ended with the click of a button. A bunch of actors in that region are hell bent on killing each other, like when Hamas did genocide on Israel last year, and now we have multiple state actors moving armies against each other. The brain-dead premise that somehow Democrats “want genocide” makes it impossible to have a serious conversation.

If you don’t vote for Harris over a mess in the Middle East that we didn’t directly create and are not directly responsible for, and that the Biden administration is trying to solve even if it’s too slow for your taste; and instead you act in favor of helping Trump who will absolutely empower Netanyahu to do whatever he wants, then not only are you directly voting against your own interests, but you are engaging in a level of dumb-fuckery of supreme proportions. And fucking all of us over hard while at it.

In short: By opposing Harris right at the finish line of the election cycle, you are going to inflict Trump’s dictator regime and the runaway christo-fascist GOP on the entire planet, because you are dissatisfied with how mediocre Dems have been at trying to stop Israel. You think this makes you virtuous. It does not.

Amazing.

90% of my comment was to explicitly say what Democrats do. And you managed to single out the 10% that wasn’t about Democrats.

Why stop there? Throw in some “both sides” stuff too.

There are policy details on her website: https://kamalaharris.com/issues/

But it’s pretty simple overall. She’s not a maverick, what’s on offer is simply the Dem agenda with a younger change of guard. The Dems believe in running the economy from the middle class, because investing in people is how we achieve long-term economic success and improve quality of life. So all her policies are going to be the same they would have been for Obama or Biden: improve social protections, improve access to education, improve access to housing, lower costs of living, make the corporations and wealthy pay their fair shares, pull away from needless wars, strengthen international relationships and create trade agreements of mutual benefit.

She can talk policy until she’s blue in the face, but we all should already know exactly what we are getting when we vote for a Democrat. The last time this country had a balanced budget it was Democrat. When we raise the minimum wage, it’s a Democrat. When we try to make education more affordable or help those with student debt, it’s a Democrat. When we strengthen unions and increase taxes on corporations, it’s a Democrat. When we pull out of wars, when we increase social services, when we increase protections for minorities, when we secure our clean water and block chemicals and pesticides in our food and household products, when we raise fuel efficiency standards and make corporations pay for pollution, it’s a Democrat.

It baffles me that we have to talk about this stuff like it’s new. It’s simple and it has been for years:

You want a party that runs the economy like adults, and works for the middle class and the well-being of the people: Democrats.

You want a party that works for the rich and corporations, blows up the budgets recklessly, and thinks the low and middle classes are a resource to be used and drained: Republicans.

While we are on this spicy topic today, someone please remind me, what did Jill Stein do?

the democrats have advanced progressive policies these past 4 years

Did you mean decades?

The Democrats are the only party in the US creating good jobs for workers, supporting unions and rising salaries, increasing the minimum wage, investing in the middle class, trying to reign in corporations, stopping the wars started by the GOP, and managing the economy like adults trying to close down the deficit gaps created by GOP policies.

The third party candidates are unfiltered BS candidates that are neither experienced nor prepared to lead, and don’t even care or try to govern since their campaigns are not designed to win any seats but only to gather attention and draw votes away from Dems.

And there’s no point in speaking of the GOP since it should be obvious to anyone serious what the GOP does to education, middle class, salaries, unions, deficit, and now with their Project 2025 plan for minorities and anyone that doesn’t identify as rural white Christian.

voting for a third party is fine

Try again.

deleted by creator

https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/09/14/donald-trump-at-wharton-university-of-pennsylvania/

It’s rare for a professor to disparage the intelligence of a student, but according to attorney Frank DiPrima, who was close friends with professor William T. Kelley for 47 years, the prof made an exception for Donald Trump, at least in private. “He must have told me that 100 times over the course of 30 years,” says DiPrima, who has been practicing law since 1963 and has served as in-house counsel for entities including the Federal Trade Commission and Playboy Enterprises. “I remember the inflection of his voice when he said it: ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!’” He would say that [Trump] came to Wharton thinking he already knew everything, that he was arrogant and he wasn’t there to learn.”

Trump is an imbecile that can barely string sentences together, so what he says needs to be translated for the rest of us.

In that particular instance, what he was trying to say with his limited ability to communicate, is that he believes that Kamala had tried to distance herself from her black heritage when she thought it was politically convenient in the past. But then she decided to reclaim her black heritage when she felt it could help her politically once again. He is accusing her of playing racial identity politics with her own racial background.

The “put out” in that statement was him trying to say that Kamala herself issued political messaging to distance herself from her black heritage. He was saying that Kamala herself “put that messaging out.” So that moment in the debate wasn’t about slut shaming, it was about racial politics shaming.

I’m pretty sure she’s answered the question every single time. She starts framing the question about how she intended to anchor her economics on boosting the middle class. She starts repeating the thing about being middle class, for the people listening that are slow and need to have things repeated and simplified.

Clearly, even her trying her best to make it simple for the simpletons wasn’t enough, when some of them think she’s not answering the questions. The same people then turn around and say the guy that speaks about sharks and batteries and rambles about crowd sizes and hating immigrants is for sure an economics genius that always answers the questions. What a time to be alive.

This is true, but it’s also incredibly dumb. Like teens that choose to hang out with local drug gangs and throw their future away. You can see why it happens, but it’s so wasteful and stupid, and always ends in misery.

What we are ultimately talking about is the depth of stupidity that people are capable of.

Before the flathearthers, Tea Party, Q-anon and the MAGA movements, we simply did not account for just how fucking dumb the average person can be under bad circumstances.

This is the essence of Trump’s rise to power. His political advisors called this “an opportunity” and tripled down on it. They believed that a bad-faith movement could build a coalition of the mentally unstable, susceptible morons, cultish religion indoctrinated, under-educated and socially fringed. Easily swept up with Nazi-style messaging and politics.

The solution: At an individual level, if you know someone you seek to save, work to expose them to real information by being a positive and understanding presence in their lives, and slowly showing them the way out of the prison of stupidity inside their own heads.

At a global level, we must exact hard costs on their movement as a whole and each participant as people. We must make it highly expensive and damaging to support fascism. They are already paying the price of being marginalized socially, but costs need to be much higher.

This cost is the reason Trump has not been able to inspire his moron minions to violence in the last couple years. They see that MAGA minions get imprisoned, their lives ruined, and possibly shot in the head, and they simply don’t turn up for Trump’s calls to violence anymore. The public cost of participation in fascism works as a deterrent, so we need to crank up the costs significantly higher.

If they think they are going to double down on fascism because you called them out, then you must triple down on exacting a price for their bullshit. At some point they’ll realize it’s not worth it. Just like all these MAGA men on dating apps now pretending to be apolitical because they can’t get any women to take them seriously. Suddenly, the pride in their shitty convictions is out the window when they realize they won’t be allowed to participate in society. Keep making them pay the price of choosing poorly. The harder you hit them, the faster you help them do some much needed introspection.

There is no license. That’s why a nakedly bad-faith propaganda network like Fox or RT can call themselves “News” and get away with it for decades at a time.

In the US, only money has a real say. The way to force news networks to shape up is to keep finding them in damages for deliberately misrepresenting the truth. In other words, treat their misinformation as the deliberate fraud that it is, identify how it’s hurting our society, put a $ number to that damage, and sue networks like Fox into extinction.

They already had to pay nearly a billion from hurting one company.

This was pretty fun and surprisingly wholesome even for him. He went into a town hall event that was like 70% hard MAGA people wearing red hats and Trump shirts. He talked to them as people and made fun of himself. He even wore the Trump hat and posed for pictures with the MAGA kids https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXOS8rYWgAAXW2s?format=jpg&name=900x900

Everyone seemed to be having a good time. The president did his best to entertain, and show people with a narrow worldview that there’s humans on the other side too.

The story of that red Trump hat he is wearing in the pic is that he traded it. He gave a MAGA guy a unique Biden presidential hat signed by him, the fancy WH ones they make specifically for the president to wear. In return, Biden demanded the red hat from that guy’s head as a trophy. Then they shook hands.

We don’t live in a perfect world. Someone is going to be president for the next 4 years, and at this stage of the game we have 2 distinct choices.

Also, what you called half-assed someone else might call the democracy process. Just because YOU want something doesn’t mean I want the same thing. Your vision for how to solve Palestine or Ukraine or improve wealth equality might be vastly different from mine. Just because you don’t get exactly what you want doesn’t mean the system is useless or not worth participating in. If you were to get exactly what you want, then I’d be getting walked over. If I get exactly what I want, then you’d say you are not being heard.

The only fair system is to elect a big-tent party and then work through dialog on trying to reach either consensus or fair compromise on the various topics. But we won’t have that option if we let the fascists get control and do their Project 2025 thing while ignoring us.

Here is another take. You vote for both:

1. The group that most closely resembles what you want AND
2. The group that most likely will listen to your requests during the administration

If there are things you want changed, Nov 5 is not the last day but the beginning. The next president will make decisions for 4 years, and every decision is influenced by people and our voices.

Ask yourself, between Harris and Trump, which administration is most likely to want the things I want, and which is most likely to listen and be influenced by my side of political views and the people I support?

For me, the answer is a hard NO on Trump, and a pretty solid Yes on Harris.

Like the other thread abut guns. Sure, the Dems talk about wanting gun reform and it never gets done because they don’t have a super majority in Congress. But the GOP is 100% against it and will never contribute. Which side is more likely to do anything to help the reform I want to see? 4 years of Dems is a good amount of time to press for issues and seek some improvements. If I let the GOP have 4 more years, we are not even going to talk about change until the next election.

Those that are willing to sit out an election because the Dems are not perfect, are inflicting the worst candidate on all of us and themselves. Don’t you dare later complain about school shootings, wealth inequality, tax cuts for the rich, abuse of queer folks, women’s rights, international inhumane policy. Don’t inflict Trump on us and then pretend to care about our issues or be on our side. If you sit out, you’ve picked a side.

No. Half of what you wrote is disconnected from what I’m saying. So let’s reset.

The present: Israel lives with a terrorist group next door that is constantly launching rockets at them and planning and executing genocide on the people of Israel. That needs to be addressed. Israel is sick of it and they decided to remove Hamas.

The US weapon guardrails are mainly to define what an appropriate use of each weapon type would be. Lots of the weapons provided to Israel are not allowed for use in Gaza due to the type of damage they cause deemed incompatible with the type of conflict. If the US pulled out of these weapon deals, all the weapons (bombs) that are currently banned would be on the menu to Israel. If you think Gaza is taking damage now, consider that the damage so far has been hampered through limitations imposed by the West.

The US supports protecting civilians, ending terrorism, and finding a permanent solution to this eternal animosity. We are the ones imposing limitations on war actions and weapons, and forcing in food convoys.

The fastest route is to end the Hamas rule as quickly as possible and transition to rebuilding Gaza and establishing Palestinian statehood. That’s what the US is currently working on. I have not seen anyone here propose a solution that would move faster towards enduring peace.

Whether people here are informed enough to recognize it, we are currently on the best path available towards progress in these centuries-old conflicts in the Middle East. The other half-baked low-information ideas proposed in this forum are not better than what the US is doing right now. “Just stop selling them weapons” is not only not going to work, it’s a dumb idea that would make things worse.

The future: Low information actors like the people in this forum are at fault for the situation that we are in now. These conflicts started long ago, and we prevented a resolution and made them worse with the naive calls to cease intervention. Hamas took control in the the 2000s because of people like you naively helping them on.

The only way to have a better future is to stop kicking the can down the road. And the US is not direct party to this conflict, so we can’t unilaterally do anything to change it. Again, backing out of weapons agreements would only make Israel bomb Gaza twice as hard, and then invite a larger war in the region.

You think our difference is that I’m ok with forgiving a little “genocide” from my elected officials. NO. I’m old enough to have been through several cycles of this Israel v terrorism crap. Hamas is mostly at fault for our current state of affairs, and I understand these issues enough to recognize that my elected officials are working on the best available course of action given the impossible nature of this type of eternal hate and genocidal intent from all parties towards each other in the Middle East.

You “stop the weapons” guys want some magical way to do better, save more lives and end conflicts faster. But when asked what’s the plan, we get crickets. “Just get Israel to stop and back off” is exactly how we ended up with Hamas terrorizing Gaza this century and using civilians as shields - learn the history circa 2005-7.

Today, the real plan is political, hard and messy. The “no weapons” plan has no merit, no future, and will only makes things worse. That’s why the current admin doesn’t spend much time taking advice from tiktok-tier ideas.

I want my US elected officials to protect civilians and seek to end the eternal wars in that region. That’s why I want them to ignore the no-plan ideas, and continue with the difficult work they are already doing to try to find a real and sustainable solution.

Yes, I trust Harris with the next 4 years of this situation way more than I’d trust this low-information forum. I don’t see Harris as “the better of 2 bad choices,” I see Harris as having a real plan that makes sense and is way better than any low-info ideas I’ve read here.