2/2

War is easy. If we want to back off we can simply let Israel get their weapons anywhere else in the world because they don’t need top-tier US war gear since Gaza is entirely defenseless and Hamas is fighting with low-tier weapons. So if we do what the pro-Hamas tiktokers want, we could simply have the US disengage, make a show of stopping weapons supplies to Israel, and then both Israel and Hamas would get exactly what they want which is to keep fighting it out to the last drop of blood, with scores of Gaza civilians dead in the middle.

Peace is hard. Staying involved so we can lean on Israel with Western influence and threats of pulling broad support, and working to bring half a dozen state actors to the negotiation table, drawing up several rounds of cease-fire proposals, trying to enforce food deliveries to civilians in a war zone. All that stuff is very hard. Even harder is to negotiate Palestinian statehood and sell it to the international community for full support. Even more will be having me, the US tax payer, pay for the Gaza reconstruction. And for the US troubles, they get labeled “fascists” by the tiktok crowd that would simply let Hamas have exactly what they want to prolong Gaza’s suffering and destruction.

If any of this sounds foreign, take a moment to think about this. Gaza’s population at the start of the conflict was 4 million people. They are fish in a barrel, locked in on every side by all countries, with no way to defend themselves against modern war weapons. People keep calling this a “genocide” under the accusation that Israel wants all Gazans dead. There are 40k dead by the count of the Hamas Health Ministry. That’s 1% of the Gaza population. They’ve been fish in a barrel for nearly a year and only 1% official casualties. This is because the US puts guardrails on what Israel is allowed to shoot at as part of their anti-Hamas operation, as the US seeks to find a way to end the conflict with some form of agreement. If we pull out completely and let Israel and Hamas have at each other no-holds-barred like they want to, you think the death toll after 1 year of modern war rockets on a defenseless population would be 1%? Israel has the military might to wipe Gaza completely within weeks. The West is standing in their way using international pressure and the rules embedded in the weapons agreements.

The reason we DONT want to pull out of Israel is so that we can continue to stand in their way to protect Gaza’s civilians. So that we have a say in pushing in food convoys. So that we can head the negotiation table and demand a cease fire.

1/2 In short: No more bullets or rockets on either side moving forward. It would be a culmination of centuries of deeply rooted animosity in the region.

There are only 2 ways to get there. Either the bigger side kills every one on the smaller side, as is customary in human history. Or (#2) the Western world order steps in to force a Palestine state that will be fully recognized and protected by international agreements (the same way that Israel is allowed to draw breath today, through the protection of the bigger Western guns demanding peace).

Since it’s clear we are simply not going to allow Israel to do #1, the only option left is to do #2. As long as Biden ->Harris goes, this is the direction of things. So on the current path we are on, we are most likely to end the Hamas terrorist rule, secure Palestine as a state and let them form a government, use my tax money to pay to help rebuild Gaza, and apply social equity investment to help Palestinians form trade and communication ties with the world to guarantee their place.

Once Palestine is a fully recognized country with a seat in the international community, they’ll have to answer at a state level for any Hamas-like BS they might start later, and they’ll also be protected from any future Israel incursions.

We all wish this could be done in a few days with zero civilian casualties, but that’s not how things work, particularly when the terrorists that run Gaza want their own people dead (as martyrs and meat shields) with twice as much gusto as the invading force. The reason negotiating a cease fire is so complicated is that Hamas doesn’t want one, because they are getting exactly what they want, a nasty war with lots of dead civilians for their propaganda channels.

Biden’s strategy so far has been to use Western influence to put guardrails on what Israel is “allowed” to do in terms of operations and certain weapons use, and lean hard on all sides to accept a peace agreement. Mind you, settling ALL sides is quite a complicated mess because Hamas terrorism has a lot of support from Israel-hating states that love the depth of the conflict. Region countries that don’t see human life as valuable like we do in the West, and are happy to use a destitute population in Gaza as martyrs for their political objectives against Israel.

“What an evil comment” says the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

that’s being manipulated with propaganda warfare by terrorists groups, to support an agenda of hate and death on both sides of the conflict, including Palestinians civilians.

Those of us that want a decades-old conflict to reach a sustainable end are now “the fascists” in the eyes of the deeply disinformed and dangerously vocal tiktok simpletons.

You haven’t made any effort to ponder on why the leaders of my country that take this stuff seriously and are trying to solve it won’t waste a minute of their day to listen to your nonsense Hamas talking points. You just decided that anyone that is not like you knee-deep in terrorist propaganda has to be evil. Fantastic. What a champion of morals, willing to teach the rest of us how to not want children to die - we would be so lost without your moral guidance and tiktok-tier understanding of these complex issues.

Thank you for helping with today’s demonstration.

? It’s a cartoon, I don’t see it trying to pass as a real picture of 3 people with a transcript of what was said in regular conversation.

Given the title of “civics”, what I understood from this is that anything we say in current politics can be said reasonably, and people can choose to be decent, respectful and gainful in how they interact with each other. Lots of people and places have rules against “politics” talk because we can’t behave ourselves. But being divisive is not a requirement of politics, that’s just us being assholes.

The people in the cartoon are showing us that you can also talk about these issues respectfully and working together.

For instance, lots of assholes around these parts come in with their pro-Hamas rhetoric talking about how the US is supporting genocide, acting like the rest of us are happy with children being bombed. The difference is not that we support genocide, the difference is that we don’t think the answer is anywhere near as simple as they want to make it. That region is full of religious hate and ignorance with roots of bloodthirst that go back thousands of years, and it will not be fixed overnight with any one policy.

And where is the outrage about Sudan? https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/22/africa/sudan-darfur-humanitarian-aid-intl/index.html

10 million people have fled their homes due to civil war, the WHO says 8.5 million peoples are at emergency levels of food insecurity, and the UN is warning that the death toll could be 4 million people if we don’t intervene aggressively https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/08/21/g-s1-18004/famine-hunger-sudan-united-nations-food-insecurity

Let me be clear. My president in the US and his Secretary of State are already working hard on finding a cease-fire deal in Gaza, and the entire West alliance is putting pressure on Israel to end their operations. But who is working to do something for Sudan? While all these pro-Hamas drones are plastering the internet with Hamas propaganda and doing shenanigans at the DNC to get attention, yet nobody gives a shit about 4 million impending deaths by famine because they didn’t see it on tiktok. Where are the calls to hear from a Sudanese-American at the Dem convention?

And here we are with this cartoon asking me to find a way to listen to the pro-Hamas tiktok simpletons, and try to communicate with them to find some common ground. It’s hard, but it’s true that we don’t HAVE to be assholes, we just are for now. The one side starts at asshole and goes from there, and it brings out only the asshole out of the other side. Same for any topic. But it doesn’t have to be that way, it’s just the way we are doing it.

Now, for a practical demonstration, watch the response from the pro-Hamas simpletons.

Trump will sue you constantly over petty BS like the state of your home’s paint job and some made up story about how you hit his trash cans with your hummer truck (when you don’t even own a hummer), and Vance would wait for you to be stuck in the hospital caring for a loved one to file a HOA motion on your home because you forgot to mow the lawn that week.

Kamala is the neighbor that shows you how to fight Vance’s HOA motion, and Tim Walz shows up the next day and mows your lawn with his own riding mower without even asking you about it.

I know it’s hard to find real images of these families since most pics online are going to be PR-approved. But that image of the Vance family is quite disingenuous.

The Vances are cosplaying as a regular rural family, but he is an Ivy graduate who sold himself to a twisted libertarian billionaire, and she is a highly paid Ivy lawyer that has worked with the corrupt conservative SCOTUS judges. A real picture of those 2 would be in fancy dressing at an exclusive cocktail party for the dirty right-wing powers trying to control the country. Far from salt-of-the-earth Americans just trying to live their lives.

Nobody that understands how this works could have said that. Once you are already at war, it’s either sending more thousands of American soldiers with guns firing at anything that moves, and then civilians die anyway, or use the drones to shoot at targets with precision, and then civilians die anyway. The only people that think civilian deaths during war are 100% avoidable are people that have no idea what they are talking about and like to wax lyrical from behind a keyboard.

There was one other place where it could have been stopped, and that’s earlier by preventing war mongers from gaining power and starting the wars in the first place. I’m sure you did your part then using your vote effectively to prevent Republicans from gaining power for 8 years, just as you are ready to vote effectively now to prevent a Republican from returning this Nov.

Those are military choices. People need to stop imagining these law-degree prime ministers as kings that control every aspect of government. The military had been developing drones for a while, and having superior tech wanted to use them more. The wars were started by the Republican jackasses before Obama and we were already stuck in them. There’s a very limited playbook Obama could draw from to have any influence in that situation. He simply did what any US president would have done by continuing with the mess left by the previous admin and following the recommendations of the generals when it comes to the approach to war. Military stuff was one of Obama’s weakest knowledge areas, so he did what any educated person would do and simply let the seasoned experts handle it.

If you ask me WHEN I had a problem with it, it was when we let Bush start a series of unwinnable wars promising it would be done in 3 months and over some BS excuse that everyone knew was nonsense going into it. I don’t blame Obama too much for the tech advancements in drones, and I don’t blame Biden too harshly for the exit out of Afghanistan. I blame the morons that create that unsolvable problem, promising it would be cheap and easy and would go great.

Obama knew from a young age he wanted to be in politics, so he lived his life as neatly as possible towards that objective, including graduating with honors from top American schools and leaving a manicured political track record of his path.

Republicans wanted so hard to hate on him but they couldn’t find anything. He ran an excellent presidency, he spoke very carefully with great charisma, and his background was pristine.

That’s why any controversies about Obama had to be fabricated. Republicans attacked him for the mustard, the color of one of his suits, how he rode a bike, how he was physically fit and very good at basketball (an urban sport). They fabricated claims on his birth certificate. They blamed him for stuff that happened on someone else’s watch (why didn’t Obama keep us safe on 9/11? Why didn’t he prevent the economic crash of 2008?)

They attacked him with that nonsense because they couldn’t find anything else to attack him on.

It’s the new line of Republican attacks on Kamala as they try anything they can think of.

They found out that she likes Doritos, because she said that when she won her election for the Senate in 2016, she ate a bag of Doritos watching the election results on TV as she mentally accepted the mandate to fight for her state of California against whatever Trump had in store to antagonize them. So now Republicans have decided that eating Doritos when pondering on one’s life is beneath the dignity of a head of state.

https://www.salon.com/2024/08/20/are-you-kidding-me-fox-news-guest-fumes-over-kamala-harris-eating-a-bag-of-doritos/

It is a known fact that briefly dating Montrel Williams several decades ago, when you are both available singles, provides a direct path to becoming the Leader of the Free World. I tried it myself but couldn’t get Montrel to set a date for a movie night no matter how desperate my DMs. Ah, to think I could have been a contender.

Yet I, for one, am glad that Mr. Trump’s dating history is unimpeachable, because I don’t think I could handle 2 risqué backgrounds in a single presidential season.

It’s crazy how Trump can’t stop talking about how attractive he finds Kamala. He has compared her to his imported model wife, and to Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor, and then recently he decided enough is enough and went on a rant about how he himself is hotter than Kamala.

I don’t remember a single Dem politician or pundit going there at all. Everyone was busy scrutinizing her record, her success chances, and her policy platform for the next 4 years. But then again, I don’t remember Dems going far out of their way to call every female politician dumb and unhinged, as is customary in Republican campaigning. This weird cult of sexualizing every woman while calling her stupid, no matter the scenario. She could be an accomplished lawyer with an economics undergrad, wearing a pantsuit covered from neck to toes, and they’ll still go there.

I think, since the lettuce won that race, we don’t really know when the lettuce would have finally wilted. We just know that Truss was no match.

The Mooch was one of the many officials to come and go in the Trump admin. Anthony Scaramucci, affectionately known as “The Mooch,” lasted 10 days of chaos before being shown the door.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40806586

Since then, the mooch is accepted as a unit of time equal to 10 days in the metric system, or 11 days if measuring in imperial (his actual term was something like 10.6 days). The defacto use of a mooch for measuring time in the US is the metric 10 days per mooch.

The mooch is an appropriate unit of time to measure the duration of failed political positions. Another unit of time that serves this purpose is the lesser-known British Truss, which is 49 days imperial. That one is often reserved for failed heads of state.

JD Vance was nominated on July 15, so by Aug 16 he has latest 32 days so far. That would be 3.2 mooches. I guess this meme was made to stay fresh for a few days, optimistically presuming Vance will make it to at least 4 full mooches.

That’s how he walks around. This one is directly from NBC News so we know it’s not shopped:

https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_nbcnews-fp-1200-630,f_auto,q_auto:best/rockcms/2023-06/230629-jd-vance-mjf-1718-92f842.jpg

It’s more important than that. Trump is laying the ground work to try to steal the election in Nov by saying that he has once again been cheated by the electoral system. That’s why it’s so important to him to pretend that his crowd sizes are enormous.

We have a civic duty to rub their noses into their tiny crowds that don’t represent real America, to make sure it’s clear to all that the MAGA movement is a minority of the weirdos, and by no means deserves nor is expected to win in November. After the election, when Trump tries to pretend he commands the majority and he should be crowned king, the entire country needs to be ready to laugh it off and hold the line of democracy.

Perhaps the link is loading something different for you and me? Because just in the first 7 items I see:

Raised the minimum wage Reverse draconian Trump policies on refugees and travelers Defended democracy by sanctioning Russia’s meddling Presidential commission to begin discussions to fix the SCOTUS Defended human rights by reversing bad Trump policies on the ICC New council on gender equality and equity Protect students from discrimination

That’s just the first 7 items, of the list of 52 items covering only executive actions in the first 100 days. Keep reading just a few more points and you’ll see more defense of democracy, protection of minorities, improvements to the economy, etc. Again, I could be here all day talking about how Biden has done so much for people - if we include signed bills and Bully Pulpit work, it would take hundreds of items to cover even the highlights.

Perhaps look into it a bit closer, here is a more complete list of 118 executive actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_actions_by_Joe_Biden

How did raising the min wage to $15/hr help the elites? Defending medicare, strengthening bank regulations, coming after junk fees, fighting the GOP on student loan forgiveness… or standing with unions on the picket line, and so forth. I bet I could write a list of 200 things he’s done in less than 4 years that were intended to help American workers, while I’d be surprised if anyone can come up with a list of a dozen things he did that helped only the rich and corporations.

And if anyone is wondering if I’m exaggerating about “200 things,” you should consider how much the media’s low-effort coverage and Trump’s BS circus are keeping real stuff out of the news. Biden signed 52 executive orders in the first 100 days alone. A list of 200 things he’s done for regular people vs elites would be the highlights, not the full list.

Here are his first 52 executive orders if you want to review his work: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/politics/biden-executive-orders/index.html

That massive list only gets you to April 2021.

I think that’s the point of the chart. Your elected officials are not going to magically know what you want and bend over backwards to give it to you. If you are serious about a topic, it’s on you to join the political process and have your points heard. That’s what they mean by “we work to find a fair balance.” The work part is a lot of political arguing back and forth. If you want to have influence, you have to make an informed argument for why what you want is better than what we have, and you have to square off with the group on the other side that thinks they have a better solution and will make their case too.

The Democrats don’t guarantee you that the compromise will break your way. The guarantee is that you do get a voice if you choose to participate in the political process, which is not something that’s on offer with the other party.

And to those that are annoyed by the Dems due to lack of progress or any other reason, we get it. Don’t think I’m not annoyed too. The difference between you and me is not that I don’t find the Dems disappointing, the difference is that I understand I would be disappointed with anyone because politics are about negotiation and compromise, not about having our whims fulfilled.

We have to take the wins we can get, and then work on pushing for the next thing. Objectively, Biden has been one of the most progressive and effective presidents in history, let alone my lifetime. One of the first things he did within days of taking Office was move the min wage of gov positions to $15/hr. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-sign-executive-order-raising-federal-contractors-minimum-wage-15-n1265427

People forget how much he has done and how progressive he’s been compared to even Obama. People complain that Bernie got sidetracked, but Bernie’s movement is still in the conversation and pushed the Dems further left on a ton of things. That’s what discourse looks like, and if you want real change you have to get involved with the only party that is offering a path. That’s why Bernie and AOC caucus with the Dems, because being sour about what you want solves nothing, but getting involved is a real path.

Vote for the only party that offers discourse and power to change things, and then get your voice in the mix as much as you’d like. Bernie is not sour, he is in the Senate getting things done, he is campaigning influencing the conversation, and he is constantly in the media making his points. A voice from within the system is way more powerful than one sitting on the sidelines pouting. Vote, and then tell your Officials what you want.

Makes sense. Trump’s mother was naturalized as an American citizen in 1942, and D. Trump was born in 1946, and by then his mother already called herself American. That would make her first-gen naturalized American in the eyes of the census, and D. Trump second gen given that he was born to a naturalized immigrant.

Technicalities aside, Donald Trump was born in America to a person that just a few years earlier called herself Scottish. He should certainly know about the prevalence of immigration in America, between his own Scottish and German background, and marrying immigrants himself.