Right? I'm in my 50s and both of my grandfathers happened to fight in the Pacific --though one was also in North Africa-- and you could not know those men and imagine that anything about their experiences was somehow invented or a lie. Not when you sat face to face with them.
We have pics of my grandfather on Saipan with his boys after they'd survived Guadalcanal, for example, and you just can't make that shit up. It's way too real.
Have you considered that there might be a great deal of regional variation such that while it seems "ridiculous" in your particular region and social context, in other parts of the country people are operating on an entirely different set of "received" facts about reality?
I pose this question because if the last decade has taught us anything, it's that we cannot take for granted that we are all operating on the basis of the same "facts" with regard to history and reality.
Biden thought that Trump would be politically finished if he lost the 2020 election --and in a rational world he would've been-- but he underestimated both the cowardice of Republican leaders and the slavish devotion of Trump's followers, as did many of us, myself included. That's why he feels obligated to take the safe route instead of stepping down. If Trump was gone or otherwise not the existential threat that I and many others believe he is, I doubt very much that Biden would be running again.
Trump won't win the nomination in 2028, so if he's still alive and still semi-intelligable, he'll launch a third party campaign that splits the conservative vote and gives the Dems 4 more years. You saw it here first.
That's because it's bullshit. The lemmy consensus on this kind of thing is badly skewed to the left and is basically pure amateur hour. Without doubt there are many intelligent and well-informed users who have a better grasp of the realities of US electoral politics, they just aren't the majority, and so we find objectively ridiculous comments receiving tons of up votes while anyone who dares to mention an unpopular truth is downvoted to Hades
Because Harris would then become the default nominee and Biden knows she can't win. It's either that or a punishing primary resulting in some other nominee, but who would that be? Could they beat Trump? It would be a big gamble. Biden running for a 2nd term is a gamble too, but it probably is the safer bet. His real mistake was having someone as unpopular as Harris as a VP.
I think he would be happy to hand it off to her if he thought she could win.
I also think that it didn't occur to Biden that Trump would still be viable after being defeated in 2020, but of course, like many of us, he underestimated both the cowardice of most Republican leaders and the depravity of Trump's base.
Here's what I can pretty much guarantee will be an unpopular observation; Israel is 100 percent committed to eliminating Hamas, for understandable reasons. They aren't going to stop until the job is done. Therefore, if you really care about innocent Palestinian civilians getting killed, you should want to give Israel more aid since the faster they are able to destroy Hamas, the less innocent civilians get killed.
Not sure that I agree with the morality of this proposition. It seems pretty sound, but I am still wrestling with it.
It's forced labor, not actual chattel slavery in the sense that the state can't actually buy and sell prisoners and is obligated to free them under certain conditions. Nor, unlike chattel slavery, can one be born into the status of prisoner.
They also see wealth as a kind of virtue in and of itself, one that should be rewarded.
That's not censorship. Both lemmygrad and hexbear are alive and well and freely available to anyone interested in what they have to say. By your definition I'm "censoring" Fox News by not watching it.
No, none of the other GOP candidates have anything even remotely like Trump's grip on the base. Without that none of the above can happen. Trump got where he is through a long series of steps that Kagan details in the piece. There is no world in which some other candidate steps in and immediately plugs into the same kind of power that Trump has amassed as a result of Republican cowardice. Every one of them would have to start over with consolidating power in a party that's swarming with amoral power-hungry grifters.
Dang! A measured and well-thought-out comment on Lemmy vis Israel and the current situation!
Good on you sir, or madam, as the case may be. Such comments are dishearteningly rare in an environment that's dominated by knee-jerk one-liners on the part of naive partisans who cannot be bothered with trafficking in nuance.