Musk’s new job doesn’t have any power to do anything. He can lobby Trump, the same power he already had as a rich man who gave campaign contributions. Musk may be dangerous to the US government, but it’s not because he was given a fake title.
That other villains exist in the story of the British empire doesn’t matter to whether he has to play king in Australia. It’s not a duty and he’s not a put upon civil servant. If he actually agreed that his position was illegitimate he could simply say so and stop performing it, with no meaningful loss to the world. But he’s a rich douche who’s happy to ride on his inherited privilege and claim to bestow his special personage to people across the world. People calling him illegitimate is the right and proper response to him pretending he has some special place in Australian society.
I’ll wait for the DoD or pentagon to release several studies
They did that. That’s why they’re in service today.
If they have to work with women it’s like a tax on them for having to pay those sexual harassment settlements! Clearly the solution is to prevent the women from doing things rather than stop the harassment. That’s unpossible!
He could simply not go play king in Australia. If you don’t want to be king of a country your ancestors forcibly colonized, you can just not. None of this is an obligation.
He needs people he can relate to.
Yes, of course, in the campaign where she ignored the left, campaigned with and for Republicans, and abandoned minority groups, the real problem was wokeness. While there’s always a factional blame game after an election loss, never in history has the argument from the centrists been so detached from the actual campaign that occurred.
You need to keep reading my posts until you get it through your head that I didn’t pick 5% or 1% or 0.1% because there was an estimate of increased casualties, it’s just an expression of the degradation being marginal. None of the numbers mean anything. One is worse (Trump), but on this issue not by a lot, and when someone is voting emotionally because they know people who have been killed, they may not be in the head space to see a small difference as more important than their anger.
You can talk about passionless objective voters calculating death percentages all you want, but that was never the topic of conversation. I’m not in that population, I made my calculation and a little less death is worth it, but I don’t blame anyone who lost a relative, watched Harris and Biden barely even give lip service to them and their community, and then told them to go fuck themselves. Haha, leopard sure ate their faces, what idiots.
“Hey, I hear an absolutely horrible and heartbreaking thing is happening, time to get in some election commentary” isn’t cynicism, it’s “told ya so”.
I think the masses of voters who are much less easy to influence. They’re not on Lemmy debating the topic or waiting for a community leader to decide the strategy. They probably didn’t even do any sort of deep game theory about playing chicken and scaring the Democrats. They just got more pissed off as the news came through, as the Democrats made excuses and acted like nothing needed to change, and as people in their community reported deaths. We can debate and shout and rationalize here all we want, we can suppress the topic for the greater good, and all that will have zero impact on electorate-level perceptions. They’re not here, there are too many for us to individually convince to change their mind, and they’re probably not even open to listening to a coldly rational argument about lesser evils and other topics.
Even the people organizing these campaigns didn’t have the influence to change their votes. Uncommitted endorsed Harris! But the whole thing was never in their control. They can only report the temperature they’re feeling in the community and suggest moves they think would help get people back into the tent. Those Democratic operatives and elected officials should have the potential to influence Harris. They have names people know, and phone numbers to people of importance. If she was so corrupt and blocked off that even they couldn’t reach her then we kind of do need the reckoning that could come from such an abject failure to keep the coalition together. There’s no “push her to be better after the election” in that case.
That’s what I did. Here’s two in easy form:
Topic: “Israeli drones shooting children in Gaza deliberately ‘day after day’, UK surgeon tells MPs”:
You know what would help this situation? Letting a fascist become President of the United States. Again.
Topic: “Continuing ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Campaign, Israel Blows Past US Deadline for Gaza Aid”
Don’t worry, just like how it was only fair that Ukraine and American minorities get genocided if Gaza was going to get genocided, abstaining voters have likewise decided it’s only fair for the West Bank to suffer genocide if Gaza is going to suffer genocide.
Current genocide happening, but let’s instead talk about how it’s somehow going to be worse in January because the real importance is the election.
“I think it is clear that Congress has a responsibility to act. We have legal tools here. And as I said, we cannot approve the sale of arms to a country that is in violation of our own laws on this."
F15s were just the next thing to be sent.
Are fighter jets not “arms”? They were just the next arms transfer being talked about at the time.
It’s not a “right” figure, it’s an expression of small differences. Stop trying to do math and just read what I’m writing. 99 vs. 100, 99.9 vs. 100, really bad vs. slightly more bad, whatever expression you’d prefer. The difference in impact is limited because Biden has presented practically no restriction or resistance.
I’m not counting bodies, I’m saying the relative dedication to genocide is not significantly different in impact. The material difference from Biden is literally just the 2000 lb. bombs, with an unquantifiable and unreliable hope that Democrats would snap out of it and start doing better. Hope meant it was worth trying for, because a change could be a big deal, but very likely the real difference in death come January 20th is going to be minimal compared to the death that Biden has already overseen and allowed.
A useful aspect of Lockdown mode (on top of it potentially being quick) is that you can still get into the camera without unlocking it (for me it’s a double tap on the power). When you’re locked down they can’t navigate to your photos, but you might want to be able to record things.
Ah, the nostalgia of early net flame wars. Those were the days.
I honestly thought that they’d eventually come around because of just how bad Trump was going to be for democracy, and moreover for the people they cared about. Sadly, they were so devoted to their game of chicken that some of their loved ones will pay for it.
The problem in this is that you can substitute either the Harris campaign or the Muslim voters for “they”, and far too few people are applying it to the people with power. It seems inconceivable to these people that politicians actually need to address the concerns of the people they want to vote for them. They’re like some sort of unknowable force without agency or responsibility. It’s always the little guy’s fault for not coming around to the whims of the politician.
What makes it all worse is that on one side you have a population with good reason to be acting emotionally and the other you have someone just making a calculation that they just didn’t think they were worth it. Everyone shares blame for this result, but I get acting emotionally when you’re being ignored by power while they send weapons to kill your families. I don’t have any grace for sociopathic Democrats who would rather chase Republicans than take a moral stance for a constituency that voted for them in the past.
You can always blame the monarchy for perpetuating the monarchy. “They didn’t, as a whole, proactively reject our bullshit” doesn’t mean they have to keep doing the bullshit. Everyone has agency, stop pretending one of the richest and most privileged people in the world just doesn’t have any other choice.
He doesn’t have to abdicate, he can just stop pretending he’s special. Tell them “no thank you, I don’t think my role as king of a colony is appropriate”. Let’s see that democracy you think loves monarchy pass a measure to depose an absent king and choose a successor. The monarchy exists because people are lazy and just let it keep existing, not because they’re deeply devoted to maintaining this dumb farce. But he’s not going to do that, not because he cares about democracy, but because he believes he’s special and is happy to tour “his” colonies.