If their candidate is the only thing standing between a half-assed working system of government, and an outright dictatorship- and you don’t vote for them…

I did, so put the straw man away. In a swing state, because I understand that at a minimum I’m negating someone else’s R vote. I’m following politics outside the election cycle and aware of the FPTP game. You can make the “less shit” argument to me, and have it work because I recognize it’s true.

But that’s exactly my point about the apolitical and/or low propensity ‘normie’ voters - Trump has confidence and an answer for everything, if you ignore the absence of details. Harris struggled/refused to define herself and her platform - effectively giving that job to the media and the opposition. “Everything will stay fundamentally the same” was a vote loser for most of America this cycle, and that was the Democratic platform.

I don’t know about you, but I sure as shit am glad we dodged that “no policy having, pro-democracy” bullet, eh?

In a way, kinda? Trump is on a fascism speed run through the Project 2025 goals, and has a sycophantic circle of incompetence around him that keeps making blunders atop his own. Going this hard and this fast has had blowback, with him tanking his approval rating accordingly in record time.

Were he an actually steady hand that could play long chess, build coalitions, and quietly place plans in motion? Deport worst-of-the-worst criminals instead of literally whoever is brown, quietly subvert NATO and hamstring the unified command instead of JD and Hegseth chastising Europe and openly questioning Article 5, give Israel/Saudis a browbeating in public whilst increasing arms sales instead of ‘hell yeah, kill them all’ tweets, etc

Effective dictatorship I fear a lot more than an incompetent strongman. People bend and mold themselves to the former over time, the latter rips off the bandage too fast and pisses off voters who form resistance coalitions.

Or, here’s the apparently radical third option… do what the voters want and reel Bibi/Givir/Smotrich in, or at the very least stop giving Israel outright political cover. “Israel gets to do war crimes and/or genocide… and you pay for it” was a uni-party stance in the 2024 cycle, and it’s fucking infuriating. I expect the right to back Israel reflexively, but I did NOT expect to see y’all pull the mental gymnastics make yourselves be okay with it. And then have the gall to shout down and bully away criticism of the party’s complicity.

If your candidate can mostly be summed up as “less shit” then that damning sales pitch to get the ‘apolitical normie’ vote out to win elections s. Kamala barely stood tall on any firm policy - let along a coherent platform, didn’t distance herself sufficiently from Biden, and didn’t respond to voters’ legitimate economic anxieties. At that point a demonstrable lies become the sound bites differentiating Trump from Kamala.

The duality of man

People were trying that last year already, together with the arms deliveries. Until you came along and fucked with everything.

There must be a specific phrase or stolen-language word for this idiocy, because ‘hubris’ ain’t cutting it. To assume that everyone is wrong for doing it X way that you quickly do a 180 on, only to slowly realize the reality that drove everyone else’s decisions.

And then slowly and very publicly course correct back to ‘the way things were’ while never coming to terms with your mistake.

I have worked professionally with Chinese vendors and suppliers for years, both pre and post COVID. China offers the whole range of manufacturing, not just cheap labor but high tech and precision devices too. You want cheap injection molded toys for Happy Meals? Done. Precision machine tools for CNC? Can do. Medical imaging devices? No problem. Mass assembly of automotive cable looms? Easy. If a business wants quality product from China they can do it.

And much like the classic European model where a textile or steel industry would collect in a valley for logistic/resource reasons and organically form an industrial ‘core’ the same is true in China, but with a centralized planned economy. Vocational schools feed local industry with skilled workers like engineers or tool and die makers, so that region experiences further and further specialization and conglomeration.

There’s no coherent or comparable manufacturing:educational alliance in the US, closest we have is ‘feeder schools’ that partner with individual industrial/scientific giants on an ad-hoc basis.

Why patch out a bug that’s working in our favor?

Just buy a seam ripper, and sanitize your branded sweater/blanket/jacket/etc from their embroidered trademark.

Isopropyl alcohol or xylene can take off most printed/transfer logos on plastic or metal objects.

Worst case scenario you give it to someone else/homeless so it doesn’t end up in a landfill or wastefully recycling an otherwise usable product.

Unfortunately no longer true since the 2018 basic law where Israel defined themselves as for the Jewish people only, revoking a core part of the 1992 Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. Which led to large public protests within Israel at the time. The current admin are off the rails atm.

After it was passed, several groups in the Jewish diaspora expressed concern that it was actively violating Israel's self-defined legal status as a "Jewish and democratic state" in exchange for adopting an exclusively Jewish identity.

Not gonna lie, his return to music and most recent two albums are pretty good if you like the Fred Again style of production.

Dubstep is a hard genre to get into, aside from very few album releases (there are A LOT of singles/splits) there’s some big sonic variation. Some of the faster, more frantic tracks sound closer to Jungle, while other artists like Burial bring a lot more of the UK Bass sound, and then you’ll get a very downtempo track, or a flute as the main instrument.

It’s kind of a “I know it when I hear it” vibe lol

The old heads remember what dubstep actually is, before Skrillex took the name and ruined everyone’s understanding of the newest genre from the UK garage/drum and bass scene. All my homies hate Skrillex.

And if this goes on long enough, we’ll have samizdat resistance ‘zines typewritten and passed around at dead drops to avoid ISPs having data any to give up to a warrant/less search, or metadata to trace the authorship

Vladimir Bukovsky summarized the samizdat process as follows:

“I write myself, edit myself, censor myself, publish myself, distribute myself, go to jail for it myself”

I’d rather not find out what else that future entails

Any woman who receives something good, did it by trading sexual favors

Aisha Bowe is an actual aerospace engineer, Amanda Nguyen an activist for sexual assault victims, and the rest are either rich, powerful, celebrity, or combination. Except Sanchez.

A PR stunt to deflect from Bezos’ permanent duck-faced fiancée getting a free ride does not mean the rest are strumpets who blew their way to the top. Exceptionally poor judgement yes, and they deserve derision for that.

In any other presidential term, that can be a fair assessment only a few months in. The economy can be compared to a Panamax oil tanker - it moves with huge momentum and can’t be steered quickly.

But this tariffs nonsense detonated a bomb below the waterline. You may not be able to steer the ship quickly, but deliberate sabotage can absolutely cripple it and spread damage everywhere. Quarterly 401(k) statements are being sent out, plus it’s tax season, so people are very in touch with how this is impacting them and their money

I have heard multiple firearms trainers give statements to the effect of

If your open hand skill [unarmed fighting] sucks, you will rush to the firearm instead of other options because you don’t have faith in yourself. And when the first bullet doesn’t do the magic of an ‘instant stop’ like people pretend, you’ll end up mag dumping.

And if you watch police body-cam footage, you can see their panic switch pull the trigger, and then the cadence of gunfire rapidly picks up after that first shot.

Go look at any police force in Europe where the ‘suspect with a knife’ gets vastly different treatment.

• Police gang up and tackle them
• Nets/bolas style deployable restraints
• Low speed vehicle ramming to get the suspect on the floor and dazed
• Beanbag/less lethal shots to the body for pain compliance/muscle shock so they drop the knife

Euro cops almost always have a pistol, but the mentality is completely different regarding shoot v no-shoot

So weird how, every time there’s criticism of the Democratic Party, some pearl clutcher brings out a cynical argument to divert attention from the train wreck that they persist in simping for.

I’m super tired of the Schrödinger’s Leftist argument - somehow insignificant enough to ignore on policy proposals, yet simultaneously crucial enough to be bullied into electoral compliance.

If a meme is giving you badfeels because your party keeps taking a rough shit each election whilst choking out grassroots challengers, maybe you should demand a better party instead of posting drive-by takes online?

Collective trauma is real. The Jewish people, and the world, should never forget the Holocaust. But when “never again” gets twisted into “never again, for us” it changes the attitude entirely:

I will tell you something about the Holocaust. It would be nice to believe that people who have undergone suffering have been purified by suffering.

But it’s the opposite, it makes them worse. It corrupts. There is something in suffering that creates a kind of egoism. And when such monstrous things have happened to your people, you feel nothing can be compared to it. You get a moral “power of attorney”, a permit to do anything you want – because nothing can compare to what has happened to us. This is a moral immunity which is very clearly felt in Israel.

Uri Avery, speaking after the IDF’s massacre at Sabra and Shatila

Uri was a Zionist poster child - his immediate family fled to (then mandatory Palestine) after the Nazis took power; every other relative who stayed in Germany was murdered in the Holocaust. His life story is incredible to read, and it’s a bitter truth to accept that he was marginalized and ignored by wider Israeli society because of his peace activism later in life.

Bruh it’s happened so much there’s an Israeli High Court case that specifically forbids the practice. Hasn’t prevented the practice, there are multiple documented instances, from different conflicts, that the Jewish group B’Tslem has a white paper on just the subject of IDF using human shields:

…soldiers have ordered Palestinians to:

-enter buildings to check if they are booby-trapped, or to remove the occupants

-remove suspicious objects from roads used by the army

-stand inside houses where soldiers have set up military positions, so that Palestinians will not fire at the soldiers

-walk in front of soldiers to shield them from gunfire, while the soldiers hold a gun behind their backs and sometimes fire over their shoulders.

The soldiers in the field did not initiate this practice; rather, the use of human shields is an integral part of the orders they receive.

Marco Rubio suicide watch has been sooo cathartic during this administration. The Zelenskyy blowup especially - after decades of waiting and maneuvering, deal brokering and sycophancy, he finally has the job where he can ‘outshine’ Kissinger… and the wave he’s riding is with these idiotic blowhards.

Came to the comments just for this, was not disappointed