you were trying to suggest that Biden wasn’t the most pro-israel politician of all time, when its like, extremely well documented thats who the guy is

Do you know what the pro-Israel politician who is his opponent in the current election wants to do in Gaza?

Or how the pro-Israel politicians in congress reacted when he paused weapons shipments?

Biden’s support for Israel is unconscionable. They’re committing an active genocide and he’s arming them while they’re doing it.

What I said wasn’t that any of that wasn’t happening. It was that that stuff is all very usual for US presidents. Coups and killings, drone strikes and starving kids. It’s all what they do. Every US President since Carter has voiced their full throated support for Israel for decades, as the whole time they have slaughtered and starved, made apartheid and taken land.

Biden’s actually highly unusual in that he made sanctions on settlers, pushed hard for a cease fire, tried to provide aid, and paused weapons shipments. None of that, to me, means he deserves any credit. He should be snatching Netanyahu and taking him to the ICC, and landing US troops to shoot IDF members in the face if they try to go around killing anybody. But, pretending that he somehow represents a downward departure from the norm for US leaders is to me unsupported by the evidence. US leaders fuckin love war crimes by our allies.

You can represent what I just said, or why it is that the NYT clearly loves Israel and hates Biden, any way that you want, say I am lying, whatever. But that’s how I feel about it.

This is an impressively corkscrewed logical construction. Let me offer a simpler one:

The Times’s uncritical support for Israel is of a piece with its loud and unwavering recent criticism of Biden. The concordance brought about between your pretense that they were ever nice to Biden, and your pretense that Biden is an unusually pro-Israel US president, is imaginary, because neither of those ever happened.

The Times is just leaning hard into the most right-wing end of US politics that doesn’t fall completely into Naziism, in both cases, as they usually do with most things and particularly since 2022 when the new guy took over.

Interestingly enough, a lot of the tactics are a lot the same as what happened in 2016:

It was always thus

This was the point of Thomas Jefferson saying that a little revolution every now and again is a healthy thing. If there’s ever a population that’s just sitting around assuming everything is gonna be okay because of “the leaders,” or just passively observing that the leaders aren’t good, and therefore, oh no!, or anything like that, that’s a recipe for bad bad trouble.

It’s you and me man

The SCOTUS has decided that the constitution and separation of powers that forms the foundation of (relatively) safe government that we’ve depended on up until this point, is no longer the basis of the American legal system.

If it was just precedent, it still wouldn’t be good, but it would still be quite a bit safer and less seditionous than what they did.

Yes.

This is a fuckin five alarm fire. It’s time to leave the building. Don’t grab your shit, don’t put your shoes on first, fuckin worry about your safety first and foremost because this is an emergency.

I don’t know what to do, to be honest. I feel like if you just went to DC near the physical location of the Supreme Court at any point in the next week you would see at least a decent number of people carrying signs and yelling. I thought about traveling there and finding them and talking to them about who they’re with and how I can join. I don’t know that that will solve the problem, but I think it would probably put you in touch with people who are at least doing fuckin something about it.

It will be good to have allies, learn what people are trying to do, maybe some of it will be productive, and then if the real bad shit starts roughly one year from now, at least you have some allies in place. But yes. It’s a fuckin emergency. It’s real, real bad.

I actually agree that Biden’s performance was a big problem. Also, the polls are feckin useless, but seeing the relative change that happened because of some event is actually like the one thing they can do pretty well. If you remember the middle school science chart of accuracy vs. precision, they have dogshit accuracy which was off by an average of 16 percentage points when I investigated it for some recent elections, but against all odds they actually are precise.

So, that said: Here’s an overview of recent polling.

• Trump’s polls really did drop by quite a few points after he was convicted. The same outlets freaking the fuck out over Biden’s YouGov polling dropping from 42/42 to now 40/42, didn’t say a goddamned word about Trump’s “debacle” of being convicted of etc etc when his polls dropped by more than that; in fact they wrote the exact opposite story.
• The massive tanking of support which was predicted did not materialize. IDK what’s up with this NYT poll, but what the fuck, just look at the other ones. He dropped a couple percentage points. It’s not real good but it’s actually a lot less than I expected given how bad the debate was.
• All the other Democratic possibilities are worse. The issue actually isn’t Biden. The issue is that the news misrepresents reality so aggressively and mendaciously that people can’t figure out whether it’s a better idea to take home a cat that’s got some health problems, or a rabid dog. That’s the root of the whole “Michelle Obama” story – I think they were looking desperately for some story to write that wasn’t “but Biden is still better than every other alternative except Kamala Harris who he’s 2 points behind, and we can’t write about her being good because she’s a realistic replacement and writing good things about her might actually create good things for the Democrats and I’ll get in trouble with my boss.”

I am beginning to share Trump’s hatred for the media

The quote leaves out the best part.

people have cast doubt over the quality of Telegram’s encryption, given that the company uses its own proprietary encryption algorithm, created by Durov’s brother

That was exactly my point, yes

Sure, keep pretending this is a purely objective and data driven choice you reached purely for reasons of trying to help the Democrats. You can point to whatever polls you want to to help in that endeavor. I will not stop you.

Actual quote:

The Vanity Fair article also features Eliza Cooney, a former part-time babysitter who worked for Kennedy between 1998 and 1999, alleging that he groped her in his kitchen. Kennedy declined to directly acknowledge the sexual assault accusation at first, instead dismissing “the other allegations” as part of a “very, very rambunctious youth.”

“I’ve said this from the beginning. I am not a church boy. I am not running like that. I said … I had a very, very rambunctious youth. I said in my announcement speech that I have … so many skeletons in my closet, that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world,” Kennedy said, adding, “Vanity Fair is recycling 30-year-old stories, and I, you know, am not gonna comment on the details of any of them.”

When asked directly whether he denied sexually assaulting Cooney, Kennedy repeated, “I’m not going to comment on it.”

This comes right after he directly and at length denied the allegations that he ate part of a dog.

Also, this part of his very, very rambunctious youth happened (allegedly) when he was 45 and had several children.

Oh so they have dropped Cornel West and now this is the new thing for unrealistic alternatives to Biden

Dude, fuckin Jon Stewart

If you’re gonna float some weird outsider person as the alternative to Biden, float the guy who would clean up the fuckin election left handed and might well not do too bad a job running the country afterward, either

Good fuckin luck with that

I didn’t say everyone; I certainly don’t think that. When you’re backing Cornel West and saying you’re super concerned that the Democrats might lose the election and then making up false things about the Democrats and uninterested when you get called out on the false things and keep repeating them, though, I don’t think it takes some kind of crazy X-Files type of leap of logic to say hey everybody I think this guy’s not 100% on the level.

If you’ve spent any amount of time among people who went to / are in college in their early 20s, and people who were working in their late teens and early twenties, it becomes clear that college arranges for the students to have a managed-for-them life to a degree that I actually think is severely harmful to them. It’s basically a big day care. Education is fuckin fantastic, I’m not saying it’s not, but the nature of the way your life is organized within it to me I think is very bad for people.

Like yes you know integrals, very good, but e.g. I spoke to a guy who had not paid his phone bill for months, who somehow still had phone service but was genuinely very confused about how the bills he was getting now could have gotten as high as they were. No matter how many times I tried to explain to him, I couldn’t get it across. I finally just gave up the endeavor.

You know what? I actually think the answers are almost all pretty solidly productive stuff. Like taking at face value the question and saying “hey here’s how to help the Democrats win since you asked.”

That was not what I expected. I am – for real – pretty surprised. I think I have well founded reasons for being suspicious of why you would have posted the actual “just asking questions” original post, but the answers (even the discussion from people being real critical of Biden) is fine. Has the Lemmy consensus, even on lemmy.ml, shifted that far away from “let’s not vote for Biden what’s the worst that could happen”?

Haven’t you read their messaging? They are just perfectly innocent Democrat supporters who are super concerned about Biden’s chances in the election. Also they talk about Cornel West sometimes. For some reason they are not concerned about his chances in the election; they just really like what he has to say, and they’re going to vote for him. Flawless.

It’s good to see that the propaganda accounts have learned the Fox News trick of having one person innocently ask a question so a bunch of other people can rush in and provide the answer (which is turning out to be, big shocker, that Biden is bad and we shouldn’t vote for him.) As Fox discovered, it seems a lot more organic that way instead of just having someone stand in front of the camera and say over and over “DON’T VOTE FOR BIDEN.”

I am still waiting for them to learn to make accounts that are supporting Biden but doing a terrible job of it – sort of a Lemmy version of Alan Colmes – like “I’m glad the stock market and GDP are going up so much under Biden, as a rich person I think he’s doing great with the economy and also he’s sticking it to the Palestinians which I obviously support.”

I’ve seen a little sporadic trickle of accounts with very bad semiconservative opinions and then also supporting certain Democrats, but they seem pretty chaotic and probably like authentic homegrown trolls. I think the real fake-Biden-supporting propaganda potential has yet to be unlocked. I do support this new development in innocent questions, though; it seems like it’s got some potential.

Rail lives in that weird category like rural mail or power service (or, for that matter, highways) – you need to provide it if you want your country to be a civilized place, but it’s real real hard to make it available at a reasonable price and still turn a profit.

Turns out the answer was government, all along…

I’m just saying most left people I know who want to reign in the excesses of US hegemony care about US military adventures in the Middle East, or interventions in Central America, or immigration policy, or neoliberal trade restrictions against weaker economic powers… it’s highly unusual for the second thing on the list to be this particular European military alliance that is highly consensual and pretty productive for everyone who’s a part of it, and which is targeted almost entirely (now that it’s not the late 1990s anymore) at one particular big geopolitical power that they don’t have any particular love for any more than they do for the US. If we were talking about reigning them in back when they were bombing the fuck out of the former Yugoslavia, then yeah I wouldn’t bat an eye at it, but… I’m not saying it’s impossible that someone from the left managed to authentically arrive at the conclusion that out of all the possible awful things the US does on the world stage, NATO’s the urgent problem that needs to be torn down. But I think in comparison to the other obvious explanation, it seems a little implausible, quite honestly.