Oh, no, no
She may well have known exactly what she was doing and deliberately put some stuff in that would generate controversy and sustained news stories after her little speech was over
She's here to stay now, I think, although I share in your displeasure about it
Preach
(a) network effects (b) inertia (c) Matrix is still kind of a pain in the ass
Are all easily more capable to explain it (d) all the users are otherkin
How the heck does it do the curved surface one? That's nuts.
(a) $8.7 million is a laughably small amount in presidental election terms. Trump had to tap some single random donor for literally 10 times more, for literally nothing about the election, just that he didn't feel like keeping his mouth closed about some woman he assaulted
(b) I suspect it's big on "GOP" and small on "Hollywood" within that distribution. I'm sure there are some vocal media people who feel like writing a check to Republican causes, but the vast vast majority of the money flows in the other direction there
I notice we've fully moved away from the question of "am I open to criticism of Biden" without comment, and smoothly transitioned to disagreeing on some other topic without acknowledging the abandonment of the first topic. That's another common propaganda tactic; by clever selection of what parts of the message someone responds to or not, they're able to transition to a new topic without ever having acknowledged that now that we've analyzed the question a little, they were clearly completely fucking wrong about the original topic of discussion. This can be done any number of times, for any number of arguments that don't really hold up when challenged, in order to continue a hostile exchange that doesn't really go anywhere but still creates an overall impression of factual parity between the two viewpoints.
I regret to inform you that I've got a bingo now, so we'll have to close it here. I feel pretty comfortable with what I've laid out as far as Biden's record vs. Reagan's and all that, but if you don't feel the same way, I think you're gonna have to cope with that feeling all on your own.
Ah, picking one little element and ignoring the rest of the message completely! I need one more for a bad-faith bingo.
However I will tell you that the one piece you picked out also doesn't hold up. Citation:
The two countries signed strategic military agreements and Washington began stockpiling weapons in Israel officially assigned to US forces but which could quickly be handed to the Israelis.
There were tensions. Israel’s attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 was done without US approval and prompted Reagan to suspend some weapons shipments. The US administration also soured on Israeli’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
But Washington continued to protect Israel at the UN, including vetoing a Soviet move in the security council to impose an arms embargo. Still, the Reagan administration shocked Israel by talking to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, a terrorist group in Israeli eyes.
Pausing weapons shipments had nothing to do with murder in Palestine; it was because they attacked Iraq and we liked Iraq back then. Reagan, of all people, was just as supportive of the slaughter of brown people in Palestine as he was of it in many other places. And even besides the reasons why he might have been briefly upset with Israel for non-Palestine reasons, he didn't place sanctions on any Israelis, he didn't meet pointedly with Begin's political opponents, and he sure as shit didn't land the US military in Palestine.
I'm not trying to say that Biden doing those things somehow undoes $10 billion worth of weapons and money to support Israel's ongoing slaughter. I'm simply saying that it's factually true that the tiny steps Biden is taking are more than any other US leader in the long line of neoliberals has decided to do.
Have you ever called it the genocide it is?
Moving of goalposts! Okay, I didn't have that one on the card, that's new.
The answer is yes:
Here's me saying "yes, I think Biden's complicit to a certain extent in the genocide going on in Gaza."
Here's me saying "if you don't like Biden enabling genocide by not reversing US foreign policy (which, again, I don't either)"
What's the new goal posts? My guess is that you'll read the context for those statements, and say that because I also wrote loads of stuff in them that doesn't fit your narrative (e.g. the fact, that you objected to, that Biden's done more anti-Israel stuff than the criminally low bar that is every other US president), they don't count.
Here's me saying that Biden should stop sending the Israelis aid, because that's accessory to mass murder.
Here's me posting an article that says "It lets ... duplicitous President Joe Biden be less servile when Netanyahu dismisses the low death toll."
Valid criticism, I'm fine with, and there is some to give (specifically on Gaza, absolutely). Propaganda and talking points that don't correspond to reality, I object to. Surely that's not confusing?
(I mean, I know you're not actually confused -- you're assigning me views I don't hold because that's way easier than addressing what I'm actually saying, and you're fully aware that you're being dishonest. I eagerly await your pivot to some other accusation which is just as untethered from the reality, or maybe just repeating this one and insisting on it. Or maybe a little drive-by quippy insult followed by radio silence. IDK. Let's see what the future holds.)
Correct
Natural selection happens at the genotype level, not the individual level. Having a species that likes to combat with other individuals with, essentially, the exact same genotype, at the expense of both individuals, is often not a winning strategy.
(There are exceptions and caveats of course -- e.g. competition between individuals to select the fittest ones of them to preferentially survive, or Fisher's Principle which explains why the ratio of males to females is roughly 50:50 in most species, even though that's often not optimal for the species as a whole).
I take your irritation with me as a sign I'm doing something right
Hey all, just a reminder: This influx of shilling on Lemmy posting memes leading to the conclusion "please don't vote, it's not worth it, it won't make a difference, and Biden's very very bad anyway" -- it's all for one simple reason: Voting works. It is one of the rare opportunities the normal-person population has to influence the people in charge, by some small degree. It's not enough, but it's also not to be wasted.
The whole reason there's all this investment of time and energy into manipulating people's opinions is the same reason there's so much energy towards manipulating the impact of their vote after the fact, or their ability to cast it in the first place: It's worth it to put in the investment of energy and money that it takes to do that. Because voting has power.
Voting's not enough to change the system, of course. But given the choice between voting or not voting (in this particular election, at least) is like asking "will eating food or not eating help this hungry person to survive."