Biden also announced he wasn’t enforcing the law. The TikTok operators saw the writing on the wall and realized they need to bend the knee to Trump.

Don’t get too hung up on specific dates. Laws are not some physical law like gravity that are present and universal. They exist within a fuzzy context of enforcement and interpretation.

Biden made clear he wasn’t going to enforce the law. Trump made clear he was going to make a decision based on how well Tiktok flattered and bribed him. So that’s exactly what they’ve done.

You’re mistaking “it took a long time to end Apartheid” with “we shouldn’t even try to end Apartheid.”

They very much did actually. Biden shamelessly just cribbed much of Elizabeth Warren’s economic policies. Hillary’s loss in 2016 forced him to run on a much more progressive platform in 2020 than he ever would have otherwise.

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He’s had people involved in backroom negotiations for months. Yes, it is a dirty tactic. This has a lot of undertones of Reagan’s deal with the Iranians. He didn’t have great intentions in negotiating a ceasefire, but he did manage to do it. And Trump has shown a willingness in the past to hold US military aid as a stick to change the behavior of allies. It’s reasonable to think he did the same thing here.

The US DOES have substantial control over Israel. Reagan for instance dramatically affected Israel’s behavior by withholding weapons. Biden was more permissive of Israel than Reagan was.

I despise Trump, but I do not buy that argument for a second. You’re clearly taking a meaning that you’re inventing on your own, not from the text itself. “Let Israel go and finish it” could just as easily be interpreted as “they need to wrap this war up and reach a cease fire.”

Kamala called for a ceasefire, but her and Biden wouldn’t lift a pinky finger to actually produce such a cease fire. Trump seems to have actually succeeded at getting a ceasefire.

Voters weren’t expecting Biden to issue a complete trade embargo with Israel. What they were expecting was for Biden to FOLLOW US LAW and stop shipping arms to Israel, a country flagrantly violating law. There is a universe of possibilities between “stop sending Israel bombs on our dime” and “turn Israel into Cuba.”

Are Republicans going to stop being Fascist at any time in the foreseeable future? They ran a fascist in 2016, 2020, and 2024. And they have a long line of potential future candidates.

“Don’t hold them accountable while running against a fascist” == “never hold them accountable.”

And there’s no point in going after officers other than the president on this issue. It’s not like governors have much control over foreign policy.

They said the same thing about Apartheid South Africa. You think it was easy to cut ties with them? They were also tied into our military industrial complex.

And I find the argument “but it’s going to be haaard” despicable.

That part comes after, once democracy is assured.

When, precisely, did you expect that day to come?

A slightly bigger bomb won’t change anything materially on the ground in Gaza. The only significant change recently has been a cease fire. Whether it will hold or not is as yet unknown. But at least so far, Trump has somehow actually managed to be better on Gaza than Biden. Trump has shown a willingness to actually use the carrots and sticks of US foreign policy to produce outcomes. Biden offered unconditional support to Israel, while Trump seems to have forced them to come to the peace table by threatening to withhold support. In other words, Trump did what Biden’s base had been begging him to do for a year.

It’s possible all this falls apart. And it is possible that Trump will prove far worse, for example by allowing an annexation of the West Bank. But so far at least, Trump has actually been a lot better for the Palestinians than Biden. Biden and Harris fundamentally do not accept that Israel should ever be held accountable for anything.

I don’t think Trump did the cease fire out of moral concerns; I’m sure it was purely self-serving on his part. But he was actually willing to use the US’s various carrots and sticks to force through a cease fire agreement. That is something Biden never had the balls to do.

Refusing to hold Democrats accountable is also voting for Fascism. If your vote is 100% reliable to the Dems, they don’t have to do anything to win your vote. And thus, they can completely ignore you and everything you care about. The Dems have moved so far to the right that modern Republican Fascism doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to many people by comparison. After all, Democrats firmly embraced what was far-right immigration policy just a few years ago. Democrats have made a hard turn to the right. This has forced Republicans to move even further right into Fascism. And if things continue down this path, with Democrats never being held accountable, eventually both Democrats and Republicans will be overtly Fascist.

That is what happens if a party is never held accountable.

Where do you draw the line? The problem with “vote Blue no matter who” is that you give the Democrats more and more license to drift further and further right.

Kamala thought wrongly that she could completely abandon the progressive base. She fully embraced conservative positioning on Israel, the US border, and other issues. She ran a right wing campaign, compromising issue after issue to appeal to centrist Republicans.

Kamala’s degeneracy was only possible because of the attitude you espouse. Because as long as progressives are willing to “vote Blue no matter who,” there is nothing to prevent Democrats from drifting ever-further to the right.

The modern political landscape exists precisely because of the fact that for decades, progressives have been voting “Blue no matter who.” Democrats haven’t had to work hard to secure their base; they’ve taken them for granted. This has allowed Democrats to slip further to the right. As Democrats have slipped further right, Republicans have responded by moving into outright Fascism.

You are unwilling to ever hold Democrats accountable. And by doing so, you guarantee that eventually the presidential race will be “KKK vs neo-Nazis,” as Democrats themselves drift into Fascism.

I voted for Kamala, but you have to be pretty dense to think that there is any meaningful difference between how Kamala and Trump would have handled Palestine. They’re both full-on Zionists. Giving them some bigger bombs won’t change things much. They already flatten entire neighborhoods at a whim.

If two candidates will likely both be abominable on an issue you care about, you might as well vote to hold the one representing the party that has already committed genocide accountable.

I made a wizard staff. It’s about 7 feet long, is made from an old Christmas tree, and has a large amethyst crystal embedded in it.

I’m on the left, my partner is on the right.

For the extra bit of magic, I actually set the gem into the staff (set in with epoxy) at the peak of the October 2023 annular eclipse.

It’s what I call the Rapiscan systems

https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/

I just call them the rape scanners.

My biggest pet peeve about the TSA is how they get all annoyed if you don’t know what randomly selected procedures they’ll be using today.

The TSA deliberately randomizes its security procedures. Different airports use different procedures, and the same airport uses different procedures at random. Sometimes you need to take your laptop out of your bag; sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you need to take off your shoes; sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you can just use the metal detector, sometimes they want you to use the rape scanner.

Which is fine I suppose; it makes sense to leave potential threats guessing. But the real problem is the attitude of the TSA agents themselves. It’s not just that they randomly select procedures; it’s that they get angry about it. Start taking off your shoes out of habit at a TSA line that today doesn’t require it? A community college dropout will soon be by, screaming at you for daring to take your shoes off in line. Start taking your laptop out when they’ve decided that today is a day for leaving it in? Some guy that couldn’t even meet the low bar of becoming a regular police officer will be in your face about it within seconds.

Due to two facts:

1. The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think

2. The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.

It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.

There’s no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.

Either the wizard staff or the didgeridoo. Not sure which.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly. There is no path going directly from your eyes to your conscious awareness. Rather, the subconscious collects sensory input. It uses that input to create a virtual simulacrum of the world, a big internal 3D model. That internal 3D representation is what you, the conscious part of your mind, actually interacts with and experiences.

You ever wonder how weird it is that people can have intense, debilitating hallucinations? Like schizophrenics seeing and hearing entirely fictional things. Have you ever seen a camera produce anything like that? A flash of light, a distorted image, dead pixels, etc? Sure, those kinds of errors cameras can produce. But a camera will never display a vivid realistic image of a person that wasn’t ever actually in their field of view.

Yet the human mind is capable of this. In the right circumstances, the human brain is capable of spawning entire fictional people into your conscious awareness. This shows that there is an elaborate subconscious processing layer between what our conscious mind observes and direct sensory input. Your conscious mind is basically experiencing a tiny little internal version of The Matrix, entirely generated on its own wetware. And this subconscious processing layer is what makes hallucinations possible. The processes that produce this internal simulation can become corrupted, and thus allows hallucinations.

This architecture is also what makes dreaming possible. If your conscious mind only perceived things upon direct sensory feedback from the eyes, ears, etc., how would dreaming be possible?

You are essentially experiencing reality through an elaborate 3d modeling version of an AI video generator.

If the movie is good, you should support it by making a donation to the strike fund of the unions that represent the artists that actually create the movies. You can support artists without supporting the amoral companies that produce these works.