If you want to stop support for Israel’s war crimes, Kamala is slightly better than Trump. If you want support for Ukraine to oppose Russia, she’s much better. If your issue is the environment/global warming, she’s immeasurably better. If you’re concerned with things like democracy and rule of law at all levels of government, then she’s literally the only choice.

I was writing something like “I understand but here’s why it has to be this way”, but then I read comments about not wanting to take the high road and how being nice gets you nowhere. So instead: when I was a young adult in the 2000’s, angrily telling someone to “go f themselves” face-to-face might get you punched in the mouth. Someone who started swearing at everyone whenever they were angry was labelled an asshole. It’s not like I spent those years in a weak, no-confrontation, “let’s hug instead” environment either - my friends and I just didn’t put up with regular disrespect. I’ll stop there because I don’t want to glorify violence - there are better ways to deal with insults and we didn’t fight often. Most of the time jackasses just didn’t get invited anymore.

My point: online, anonymous communication removed a lot of social and physical consequences of confrontation, but that doesn’t make being nasty alright. You may say, “It’s just a f you”, but your comments make me think that being nasty is the intent. Not trying to shame you but if I’m right about hurting others being the goal then: yeah, admittedly that’s not rare anymore but you can do better.

Also you say being nice doesn’t get you anywhere. I’d ask: when was the last time you told someone to f themselves and they were like, “Oh, I never considered that. You’ve won me over.” Trading insults online leaves everyone angry and encourages inventive cruelty so the other person is hurt more. Anger is natural - we all feel it and I need to self-censor all the damn time. But there are better ways to deal with being angry, and even to reduce the amount of time you spend angry.

I can’t believe these arguments are still a thing. There have been 13.72 Billion doses of COVID vaccines administered by now. That’s roughly 1.7 doses per every living person on Earth. If even 1 in 1000 doses caused side effects there would be millions of cases. How big a data set do these…people…need as proof that the vaccine is basically a modern miracle of safe and effective medicine?

What makes me super angry is it’s not just the adults involved who will suffer. These…people…are substantially increasing their kids’ risk of serious disease because of politics and conspiracies.

• Take time off from social media once in a while, or at least avoid doomscrolling all day. Bad stories generate FAR more engagement than good stories, and every form of media knows this. If 100,000 people in your area have an average-to-good day and 5 people have terrible days, all 5 stories presented to you will detail how things are in your area are terrible.

• Physical health affects mental health and vice versa. Eat healthy (or healthier). Stay hydrated. Get 7-9 hours of sleep regularly and use sleep hygeine. Get 90+ minutes of exercise (anything that raises your heartrate) a week which is like 15 minutes/day. Don’t worry about doing it all immediately - if you try to change everything at once you’re more likely to get overwhelmed and burn out. It’s way better to make slow, sustainable changes over months than it is to do a difficult crash course for a short time and get fed up with the process.

• Do thankfulness exercises. When I go to bed at night I think of 3 things I’m thankful for in the day. On average or bad days it may be that I wasn’t in constant/chronic pain, that I got to eat and drink, and that I’m in a safe place and a soft bed. Just remembering those basics (that many of us take for granted) helps keep me aware of good things in my life.

• Find ways to enjoy hobbies that require participation - arts, sports, board/video games, whatever. Just something other than passively taking in TV/online media. This will help you feel engaged and double points if it’s something that allows for improvement because you’ll feel rewarded as you get better.

Good luck getting ring-laden sweets away from invisible kids.

It’s a propaganda technique called the firehose of falsehood. Trump is great at it because he’s immoral and creative enough to generate lies on the fly, and narcissistic enough to instantly believe his own BS.

That boss has a 2nd phase:

• Tucker Carlson has always been creepy and ludicrous and everyone knew it. In a lawsuit against Carlson a federal judge literally ruled that his flaws are so obvious that no reasonable person takes Tucker Carlson seriously.
• Elon Musk has always been creepy but IMO the world didn’t know it until a few years ago because he rarely expressed anything publicly outside of Tesla and SpaceX news.
• Trump has always been Trump. Here’s the magician Penn Jillette talking about why Trump was a great reality TV star and a shitty President. It only takes a 94-second video for Jillette to absolutely destroy Trump.

Replace “kill” with “imprison for life regardless of applicable law” and this isn’t satire anymore. It’s an oft-repeated campaign promise and has been for quite a while.

I’m surprised it’s that low. In the first several weeks alone Israel dropped hundreds of 2,000lb bombs. “The heavy munitions, mostly manufactured by the US, can cause high casualty events and can have a lethal fragmentation radius – an area of exposure to injury or death around the target – of up to 365 meters (about 1,198 feet), or the equivalent of 58 soccer fields in area.” That doesn’t even count all the other munitions used.

Here in Alberta a candidate compared trans kids to literal feces. She was disavowed by the Conservatives for a time, STILL got elected (as an independent), and earlier this month the Conservatives welcomed her back into the fold after a vote. These people almost never suffer actual consequences for their hatred.

Edit: I ended on a grim note, so I’d like to say I have hope situations like these and our responses will get better with time. I think generations that grew up with the Internet are going to be more used to/accepting of novel experiences and opinions simply by virtue of seeing a world’s worth of them. Of course that’s not to say either being open-minded or not is restricted to age, just a trend I’ve noticed. There’s some data to support this, but we’ll have to see how it evolves over time.

I don’t know about getting them to build vehicles, but one thing Trump’s children are good at is treating their charity like a personal line of credit and pretending to run it while actually doing nothing. Or at least they were until NY Attorney General Letitia James forced them to own up, dissolve the organization, and agree to restrictions on future charity work + training.

Who knows? Maybe they’d all find something actually honest to be good at if they spent some time on an assembly line.

Oops, my mistake. I think I read that she represents Georgia and mistook that to mean more than is actually the case. I’ll edit that and thanks for correcting me! At least that makes it a bit better if not exactly great.

I have no idea how/why some people decided that she’s the exemplar that should be representing them.

Just to get it out of the way at the start - Hamas is terrible. They are violent fundamentalists and do not deserve support. Neither Israel nor Hamas are “good” and the only side that deserves support and recognition are the civilians, Israeli or Palestinian, suffering because of/under their evil regimes. Now on to the rebuttal.

Israel needs no “baiting” to kill or otherwise abuse Palestinians - it’s their policy and has been for a long time. From the Nakba until today, the history of Israeli human rights violations, violence, lies, etc. is well-established. “Look at what you made me do” is such a typical excuse used by abusers that it’s almost a trope. Moreover, Netanyahu’s government deliberately kept Hamas in power as a useful bogeyman and an way to divide/foil Palestinian statehood. There is ample evidence that Israel has directly supported Hamas and other extremists for decades.

“Hamas, for its part, is alleged to have emerged out of the Israeli-financed Islamist movement in Gaza, Israel’s then-military governor in that territory, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, disclosing in 1981 that he had been given a budget for funding Palestinian Islamists to counter the rising power of Palestinian secularists.”

"In a 1994 book, “The Other Side of Deception,” Mossad whistleblower Victor Ostrovsky contended that aiding Hamas meshed with “Mossad’s general plan” for an Arab world “run by fundamentalists” that would reject “any negotiations with the West,” thereby leaving Israel as “the only democratic, rational country in the region.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official involved in Gaza for over two decades, told a newspaper interviewer in 2009 that, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

As far as the nature of the demands: “one-sided deals” is a matter of opinion, but “we need guarantees you’ll actually leave, stop killing/injuring many tens of thousands of civilians, destroying hospitals/schools/aid, etc.” seems like a pretty standard request at peace negotiations. Especially since Israel has repeatedly promised to continue to prosecute the war and establish long-term armed forces in Gaza.

If he can follow up on even a portion of what he promises, a 2nd Trump presidency will bring the USA to a halt at multiple levels like a car hitting a reinforced wall. The best version of a Trump presidency is him raging daily as he’s blocked constantly by legal challenges and bureaucratic measures thus getting nothing done. The worst version is that he succeeds in his goals, reforms the USA into a right-wing autocracy and destroys things like checks/balances and separation of church and state.

There’s nothing damning after the “but” though. What part specifically of “but unfortunately they are the folks bargaining for Gazans” do you take issue with? That’s the provable reality of the negotiations. I even call it unfortunate.

Israel has repeatedly stated their intent to continue the war in Gaza regardless of international approval. Netanyahu, among others, has stated intent to establish a long-term/permanent security presence in Gaza.

Since Oct. 7th the Israeli military has either directly killed or provided protection to lethal settler attacks in the West Bank, resulting in over 500 deaths in a section of Occupied Palestinian Territory that theoretically isn’t at war. So there’s Israeli military presence, violence, and oppression of Palestinians even where Hamas isn’t in control.

Hamas are not good guys by any stretch, but unfortunately they are the folks bargaining for Gazans. In the face of continued Israeli aggression, disregard for international approval/law, and stated plans it’s no wonder they’re demanding that any deals have rock-solid guarantees on an enforceable timetable.

No. You said “Biden is great”. I said, “I acknowledge he’s done some good, I still disagree, and here’s a concise list of reasons why. In spite of that, I’m willing to get on board to fight Trump”. You replied (and this is an exact quote): “I talk about how Biden’s done great, and you talk about how he’s not Trump”, completely disregarding that I directly addressed why I don’t think Biden is great. I did NOT just talk about how he’s not Trump.

How am I arguing in bad faith? That is the sequence of events, and it’s easily confirmed. I’m also not calling you out just because you didn’t watch the video. I’m saying you didn’t watch AND disregarded that I explicitly gave you the video as a source for my disagreement with you to instead say I focus on “not Trump”. Now you’ve doubled down with a response that paints me as arguing in bad faith and linking that to insults/abuse. I never insulted you. Disagreeing is not inherently a slur or abusive, nor is pointing out the holes in an rebuttal. If you don’t have time to watch the vid that’s understandable but wait to respond until you do or at least don’t say I only focused on “not Trump” when that’s provably not the case.

So you won’t spend 90 seconds to watch the criticisms laid out, but you’ll take the time to tell me they are all either nonexistent or invalid?