Funny. Biden wanted out of Afghanistan since the Obama years. Trump withdrew after Biden won the election. He did it mostly to hurt Biden, not because he’s less genocidal. Take a look at his antagonizing of Iran. He withdrew from the nuclear deal which hurt their citizens and killed a high ranking general to piss them off. Iran is probably going to get nukes now, increasing the chance of nuclear devastation in the middle east. Trump emboldened nationalism across the world and increased the likelihood of World War. That’s all his trade war with China accomplished. Empowering reactionary hardliners in the second place world superpower. Less genocidal my ass.

I can’t read your unwillingness to vote for Biden as anything more than justifying apathy. You use understandable frustration to justify unreasonable actions. Anarchists and Marxists endorsed Biden in 2020. You think Noam Chomsky thought Biden would be better than he’s been? Biden was only to the left of actual billionaires in the primary, yet he’s been more left wing than Obama or Clinton in office. Him saying trickle down doesn’t work and Republicans are “kinda fascist” is more than I expected. I did not want him in 2020, but because the left failed to vote in the primary, we’re stuck with him. Even if Warren wasn’t a snake, Bernie still would have lost.

Flipping the table is not a real option right now, and Trump winning will not make it more likely, but less likely. It was a dumb argument the last two elections, and it’s even dumber now. The DSA strategy of ground up leftism has been far more effective than the Green party focus on mostly just the presidency. Support your local DSA if you want leftism in America, keep the President as left wing as possible, and find a strategy of flipping the table that doesn’t empower fascists.

Deluding yourself into thinking liberals are fascists to excuse apathy is more pathetic than people who say, “I don’t care about politics.” I used to hate those people, but I realize that ignorant leftists are worse. You have serious dunning–kruger political analysis and solutions. It’s not that I don’t see the bullshit you see, it’s that I see more than you.

I’m going to vote against the even worse genocide guy. Biden has been the least genocidal president since Carter, not because he’s great, but because Obama, Clinton, and every Republican were worse. Trump may have cheered on Hamas after October 7, but that was because he holds a personal grudge against Netanyahu for backing Biden’s presidential victory. Hillary probably wouldn’t have recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, precisely because it would inflame regional tensions. Trump only did it because he respects fascist strongman like Netanyahu. Republicans are so much worse, so Democrats are my pick by a mile.

Yes. I don’t like being disappointed because I expect the impossible. Bad people die happy and successful. Only gods can punish people the way you want, so it isn’t our job to attempt it. I don’t think hell exists, but even if it does, we can’t deliver its justice. We can only deliver human justice.

Hitler was not a demon or inhuman monster. He was only able to become such a vile being because he was as complex and powerful as a human. Him being a human doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have tortured him to death and displayed his corpse to be mocked. That evil brutality should be brutally squashed. At least he’ll be remembered for killing himself like the pathetic coward he was.

I don’t care if Biden is scum of the earth or if he burns in hell. The fact that you think I could only view Biden as human because I see him as a “warm grandfather” is telling. You can’t comprehend my way of viewing things. You refuse to accept that someone can see things as I describe, so you assert that I must actually like evil people because I acknowledge their humanity.

Personhood is an essential part of evil, not mutually exclusive to it. Unless I see evidence of evil outside of humans and similar beings, I’ll stand by my analysis.

Having (what I think of as) a more accurate view of why people do evil things does not mean I think those evil things are ok. The world can sometimes be fair, life can be great, and people can be kind to one another. However, the world is often unfair, life can be cruel, and people can be awful to each other. I don’t have to like it because reality doesn’t exist for anyone. We exist inside of it and are along for the ride.

I refuse to walk away from my best understandings of reality because they aren’t pleasing. I hold a nihilist, deterministic, Hobbesian view of the world. I think we have limited freedom over our own actions and thoughts, we made up all ideas and concepts, and we can never have total certainty about anything. I embrace truths that most people refuse to acknowledge because they find those truths depressing. (I’m not superior than those people, but I am usually more correct.)

However, I still have an optimistic outlook and positive worldview. I think we can overcome our flaws and create a far fairer world. There is no God who cares about us or will save us, but we can save ourselves and care deeply about each other. The fact that there is no objective right and wrong doesn’t mean our morality and ethics are useless. There is no higher meaning outside our constructions, so the meaning we create is the highest meaning there is. We can damn well respect and believe in what we make.

I fully believe that Biden does evil shit, but malice and enjoyment of suffering probably don’t drive him. I won’t delude myself into thinking every evil action is done by a fundamentally evil person. Some people are genuinely evil, but most are not. Many people simply believe in evil systems of morality. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what is necessary to stop them. A misguided killer and a sadistic killer will both threaten your life, so you can kill them both to defend yourself.

Punishment and responsibility are not inherently meaningful. Punishment and accountability can keep people from causing future harm. Assigning responsibility can reinforce values. Brutal punishment can even scare people into submission. However, you can’t make someone feel bad for their actions if they don’t want to. Making them suffer can only help you feel better.

Justice shouldn’t be thought of as righting the past. We can only make things better in the future. We should hang up the classic idea of justice for one that can actually materialize. Otherwise, justice will never be achieved in any way.

I’ve found that cartoon villaining those with shitty opinions leads people astray. You describe Biden like a bloodthirsty sociopath who gets pleasure from killing children and risking war. If you actually pay attention to liberals like him, you realize that a number of them are trying to do the right thing. Biden has a flawed view of what is right, but he’s probably not intentionally being a bad person. He probably thinks he’s as moral as he can be, sacrificing for “the greater good.”

Not every bad person lacks empathy or morals. Realizing how easy it is for you to unknowingly be the bad guy is hard. If you want an incorrect view that misses the nuance and complexity of real people, sure, remain ignorant. I can’t stop you.

I don’t think it’s just Americans that put the year at the end.

As a minority who will experience an enormous difference if Republicans win, this outlook is viscerally revolting.

Biden has stood with the majority of the Democrats on almost every issue. If the Democrats overwhelmingly wanted to not fund Israel, he would probably stand by them. Unfortunately, most Democrats back Israel even more than Biden.

The saving grace is that Biden wants to avoid the war turning regional, making him not favor genocide done quickly. Israel can’t kick out Palestinians, as its neighbors will attack over the refugees. If Israel directly kills too many Palestinians, the neighbors will also attack. To not get dragged into a war, Biden wants the IDF to occupy Gaza and cause less collateral damage.

However, Netanyahu doesn’t want the war to deescalate, as the public will kick him and his party out once things settle down. He also doesn’t want the casualties and cost of occupying all of Gaza, as there would be more IDF fatalities. Reservists were already upset at Bibi, and if they took large enough casualties, even the military might not back him. His best option for maintaining power is to genocide Gaza and hope their neighbors don’t attack.

The US isn’t willing to withdraw support from Israel and actually motivate them to stand down. The Judeo-fascists are arrogant fools who think the US deterrent will keep them safe, but they’re playing with fire. If they directly piss off Hezbollah enough, or if they force refugees into Jordan and Egypt, or if they escalate with other Iranian backed forces, or if anyone makes a stupid blunder, everyone will pay in blood.

Obesity itself is probably too vague and non specific to be usefully called a disease. The basic measurement for obesity, BMI, would classify bodybuilders or strengthen based athletes as obese. Bodybuilders and strong people can often be unhealthy, but it’s not quite the same as someone with high body fat.

Even then, people who are obese because of high body fat might have their lives shortened through multiple mechanisms. It could be heart disease that kills them, skeletal problems due to weight, immune issues, digestive issues, practically every organ can be affected. Any or all of these things could occur in a chronically obese person, so even if pathologized, obesity is less useful as a diagnosis.

Excess weight is bad, but you can calculate weight/height without a doctor. Focusing on better nutrition, eating habits, and exercise is the solution, even if you’re young and have a high metabolism. That sugar in our food needs to be taxed or regulated, as economic incentives drive obesity rather than people being uniquely stupid or culturally degenerate.

That’s honestly kind of insulting to say that, and it shows a lack of awareness on your own part. You’re making one hell of an assumption that people aren’t informed and that they’re making a diagnosis without putting any thought behind it.

I’m not out of line in thinking that people can’t diagnose Joe Biden of being mentally unfit. People couldn’t definitively diagnose Trump with narcissistic personality disorder, and he didn’t have a known disorder that could interfere in a diagnosis. Biden has a well documented stutter, making it hard for any observer to parse his communication disorder from cognitive impairment.

People who are informed would recognize this, and even those willing to diagnose politicians from TV appearances would need solid examples of abnormal behavior that could only be explained by cognitive impairment. I don’t take armchair diagnosis seriously because I have some expertise in psychology. People want a reason to have someone other than Biden, so they assume mental disability can be determined by the public. I don’t think we can with the info available. Gut feelings will just reinforce your biases.

I get the physical part of Biden being unfit, but not the mental part. I’ve not seen any evidence of his age making him less intelligent or mentally. He’s not physically well, but whenever someone says he’s senile, I automatically assume they don’t know what they’re talking about. “Senile” is not synonymous with “out of touch.”

With the recall, concern wasn’t just coming from some rando or only Democratic partisans. I heard it from respected political scientists. They thought Newsom was likely to win, but there was still great risk of a Republican governor getting elected without popular support. It’s how Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, managed to get elected. The Governator never could have won a Republican primary, and didn’t even win the popular vote. If it weren’t for serious campaigning in the last few months, the recall could have been close.

Newsom always had majority approval, but the concern about the recall came because people were only lukewarm on him. He isn’t an exciting candidate, which is what the left claims to want. Like I said before, Biden seems more genuine about his morals and principles than Newsom. Newsom is more of what the left hates than Biden.

Newsom hate isn’t new. There was genuine worry he was going to lose his recall election, replaced by a radical Republican with a plurality of support from only those that voted for his removal. Left wing Democrats who were critical of Newsom united and organized to prevent a fascist rising to power. We put aside our gripes with corpocrats to prevent someone even worse from winning.

California is guaranteed for the Democrats in the modern era, so we usually sit on the sidelines of the fight for the presidency and hope other states make the right call. However, the recall race showed that we were also willing to hold our nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.

That’s part of why I get so frustrated by the anti voting shit. Biden is more of a genuine human being than Newsom, yet people fall for accelerationist propaganda. They delude themselves into thinking that not voting will strengthen the left when the opposite is true. The unreliability of young, left wing voters reinforces the establishment bias of not appealing to them. If they won’t even turn out for Bernie in the 2020 primary, why rely on them?

As a Cali native, Newsom would be worse than Biden. If he ran in a Democratic primary, he might lose California because Democrats here don’t like him that much. If the primary was between him and Biden, I would vote for Biden because he’s less elitist and has a better moral compass. Newsom honestly doesn’t seem to have serious principles beyond political success. He’s a distilled version of what people hate about Democrats.

America isn’t that free of a country. Democrats were always going to run their incumbent. The time to choose a left wing candidate was the 2020 primary, which is why I was devastated when Biden won. I knew we would be stuck with him for 8 fucking years. The left didn’t turn out enough in that primary, and the establishment went with one of the worst choices.

The fact that there isn’t some popular Democratic alternative at this point means it will not happen. Biden has been the most left wing president in over half a century, and none of his shitty decisions have been due to his age. Organize with the DSA or promote left wing Democrats if you’re fed up with the establishment. Recognize that becoming cynically apathetic makes you a pathetic asshole, not a person who’s better than those that try.

Zionism has always had multiple different meanings, so this isn’t a new phenomenon. Humans made up every word in existence. There is no single definition for any word and there is no universal dictionary handed down by some higher power. We make up everything and write the rules ourselves. Pretending that isn’t how language works on a fundamental level is simply wrong.

If they did care and tried to improve it, they’d ruin it.

Appreciate how good you have it. In America, child sex abuse material is only illegal when children were abused in making it, or if it’s considered obscene by a community. If someone edits adult actors to look like children as they perform sex acts, it’s not illegal under federal law. If someone generates child nudity using ai models trained on nude adults and only clothed kids, it’s not illegal at the national level.

Fake porn of real people could be banned for being obscene, usually at a local level, but almost any porn could be banned by lawmakers this way. Harmless stuff like gay or trans porn could be banned by bigoted lawmakers, because obscenity is a fairly subjective mechanism. However, because of our near absolute freedom of speech, obscenity is basically all we have to regulate malicious porn.

Linux users are the homeowners who build and fix everything they can, but look down on people that don’t find craftsmanship fun, claiming that they’re saving money by doing the work themselves. Good on you for having that hobby, but if you don’t enjoy it, spending time to learn those skills costs time that could be spent earning more money than you’d save. Paying an expert to do things you don’t enjoy is usually the cheaper option. They can be found almost anywhere, similar to how Linux users use Apple or windows products from time to time.

Mac users are suburb dwellers who view their way of life as what everyone should aspire to, ignorant to the downsides of sprawl and reliance on cars to go anywhere. Commute times suck, while walkable neighborhoods with public transit make most people healthier and happier. There’s an important classist component, often bundled with racism, that underscores this ideal.

Windows users are people that live in urban areas for work, trying to find reasonable rent or home prices as unchecked capitalism makes everything worse, but unaware why things suck. They get annoyed when people share their passion for handiwork, and dislike suburban folks for thinking they’re superior rather than the downsides to suburban life. However, because most people live this way, and live this way for work, they usually don’t have strong identities like suburbanites or handy homeowners.

Homeless people are those who can’t afford computers, overlapping with actual homeless people, and rural people are those that don’t use computers more than they need to, socializing face to face and literally touching grass.

He was a kind person with conservative values, the type of person the asshole conservatives would hide behind to conceal their real goals. When the open racists and sexists became less popular, they needed to present themselves as reasonable individuals that just value traditional American values. In many ways they did, but McCain, like George HW Bush, still had some liberal values. They believed in winning democratically, unregulated capitalism, and the liberal world order.

While these more principled conservatives wanted to make a weak liberal democracy, they still wanted liberal democracy. They still wanted consent of the governed, but they also wanted a socially darwinian society. They believed in human rights, but only the negative ones. They didn’t think people had a duty to help up their fellow humans, only a duty to not let others push them down directly. For them, small government and neoliberalism was their goal, but they had a naive view of what other conservatives wanted.

Trump era fascists are conservatives who don’t care about any liberal values whatsoever. They want free markets, but only when it benefits them. They will allow democracy when it helps them win, but abandon it when they lose. They don’t want a liberal world order, partially because they don’t grasp how well it benefits the wealthy, but also because the rules of the world order limit their preferred methods of unprovoked violence and hard imperialism. Trump will invade any country if he can benefit from it, only avoiding countries that also have fascist aligned leaders, and not wanting to directly fight countries that can fight back.

It’s legal plausible deniability. They tell the lone wolves what to do with coded language on social media, but don’t directly communicate with individual terrorists.

So liberals are fascists according to your galaxy brain? Socialist states aren’t immune to fascist takeover either. Liberals aren’t fascists, they’re liberals, and many liberals will never ally with fascism. Fascism needs communists and liberals to work together to defeat. When open socialists have popular support, alliances with liberals will not be necessary. We’re nowhere close to that you dumbass. Live in reality ffs.