Some people just want it at the bottom of the comment section instead of floating in the middle somewhere. If we could pin its comments to the bottom that would address this.

Don’t eat fissile cucumbers.

For the record, the Constitution requires that each state decide how its electoral college votes will be distributed. The federal govt has no authority to intervene.

What dems in federal govt could potentially do is some campaign finance reform, to add some transparency to all the money that flows into PACs since the Citizen’s United ruling.

We’ll see. I’m not so sure that 4 years from now the electorate will look just like how it looks today. I also suspect she can make a bolder move in the first year than she can in the latter half. Biden doesn’t draw nearly the level of heat over the Afghanistan pullout as he did a couple years ago, after all. The electorate has a notoriously short memory.

So, she does have some space to demonstrate that exact sort of leadership, and it could very much benefit her in the long run. It’ll have to outweigh all the AIPAC money on the other side, though, that’s another consideration balanced against how successful she has been with small dollar donations. So, remains to be seen how the calculus all falls out.

Election campaigning. She’s trying to win over voters, and while we like to think she could do that by just going full-on progressive, it’s just not backed up by the numbers. Suburban moderates are necessary to achieve victory, so she’s courting them, along with any conveniently available gop defectors. They lean more pro-Israel than we do, so, so does her election strategy.

Not everyone in the electorate cares much about the plight of Palestinians, a significant number of people remember the Intifadas not as some sort of just campaign for liberation, but as a widespread rash of suicide bombings on civilians just trying to live their day-to-day. They don’t want to see the US cave to that by turning our backs on an established ally.

This is why it remains important to continue grassroots efforts to bring light to the difference between innocent Palestinians and Jihadists, incidentally. Mainstream America isn’t going to jump on any sort of reclaim-Palestine-from-the-colonial-oppressors rhetoric any time soon. Peaceful co-existence by pressuring the Israeli government, supporting Israeli peace protestors and reminding people not all Palestinians are hostile militants is a different story though, that’s potentially achievable. If the electorate continues to swing, more of the politicians will get room to follow. Especially since we don’t actually need Israel’s geostrategic position any more, as of the past decade or two. We have more leverage than we used to.

Better than despairium. lol We’ll see though. Election rhetoric is one thing, policy is another. Biden is from a whole different generation, so there’s an opportunity there.

Really hoping Harris pivots on this once the elections are over.

we all know

No, actually, some of us have more exacting standards for medical diagnosis than armchair theorizing.

Fair enough.

Was hoping there’d be something in there about David Knowles, from the Telegraph podcast Ukraine: The Latest. I suppose his death is still too recent for us to know for sure what happened though.

Yeah, that sorta counts. Definitely shitty.

Sarcasm is not something outside of good faith. Good faith means you’re actively contributing as intended within whatever framework, you aren’t subtly trying to undermine it while lying about your intentions. You aren’t being sneaky, basically.

It doesn’t mean you have to be completely literal and straightforward at all times. Sarcasm is fairly common here, many people (or at least me, anyway) find it humorous.

Unless you’re referring to my top comment, in which case yes, I am genuinely curious why you keep changing your name. This is like the third or fourth time, isn’t it?

That would be a bit of an unusual sarcastic thank you, the way you worded it sorta formally, but I suppose we are on the internet after all.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure you with your lmao’s are a little more hip to sarcasm than that. ;)

Troop movements aren’t really US politics, more like general news.

Yes, I’m sure you were deeply concerned about the opinions of others…

I don’t really do the shame thing, it doesn’t work whatsoever on the shameless, which is a very high percentage of the global population unfortunately.

Regardless, the question is not whether we’re normalizing it, but whether it is their pattern of behavior or not. Not that it’s acceptable, but that it’s predictable. Just because they don’t act how other people act doesn’t mean everything they say seems like satire. Imo at least.

Little more likely you’ve simply been misled. Someone below quoted four sources, and the very best they had was one man’s testimony which was contradicted by the Kurds.

Note, the keyword is indiscriminate. Not shells aimed at fighters in a village, but a village with nobody fighting from it. That part is key.

From the first article:

The Kurds told reporters covering the offensive that there were a thousand Islamic State fighters at the mountain base.

While another source disagrees, this is a “he said she said” situation.

From the second:

Ground-launched cluster strikes caused hundreds of civilian casualties across Iraq. Human Rights Watch documented cases in most of the major cities, including al-Hilla, al-Najaf, Karbala’, Baghdad, and Basra. Doctors at local hospitals provided statistics that supported individual testimony of deaths and injuries. The majority of these casualties resulted from the heavy use of cluster munitions in populated areas where soldiers and civilians commingled.

The third quotes the very paragraph above from the second, but quotes around and omits the line about areas where soldiers and civilians comingled.

From the fourth:

Although human-rights activists insist that the coalition could have done more to protect civilians, Townsend is right: unlike Russia, America does not bomb indiscriminately. The U.S. razed an entire city, killing thousands in the process, without committing a single obvious war crime.

Note, US propaganda aside, I absolutely agree that war crimes were committed, specifically with regards to the use of certain types of munitions. This is a separate allegation from deliberate targeting and indiscriminate destruction of exclusively civilian populations though.

War is hell, after all. All war is hell. It always kills civilians if they are present, yet it remains legal if pursued with appropriate “care”. It takes more, then, than fighting occuring within residential areas to demonstrate the targeting of civilians.

Uh huh. I’ll go “do my own research” right away, thanks.

Still waiting on that specific example. I’m also a little leery of the “explicit murder of over 1.5 million known civillians” claim. Source on that one?