Let’s get this out of the way: Biden is old. He’s slow and halting in his speech, he sounds like an old man. I’d rather we had a younger candidate running, but he’ll get the job done.
His opponent, on the other hands, sounds like he’s damaged mentally. He has a fucked up brain, and it’s obvious that there’s something more going on than just an age-related slow-down. Here’s a diagnosis by Dr. Elizabeth Zoffman, a forensic psychiatrist and an Associate Clinical Professor of Forensic and General Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.
- Changes in speech patterns with many fewer and simpler words (decline in vocabulary) with fewer adjectives and adverbs.
- A decline in cognitive focus on speech subjects with incomplete sentences and an inability to focus on a topic long enough to complete a sentence when not reading from a teleprompter.
- Difficulty pronouncing words, word substitution and nonsense words – known as paraphasia
- Tangential thinking where the topic switches mid-sentence to some unrelated topic.
- Frequent repetition of words and phrases as if his mind is stuck in a loop.
- Disinhibition and an inability to control verbal outbursts.
- Socially inappropriate behavior – mocking a man with muscular dystrophy, disrespecting fallen soldiers as losers.
- Lack of self-awareness in that he apparently cannot see how inappropriate his behavior has become and use his judgment to stop himself.
- Changes in movement and gait. His walk appears wide-based and he has developed a swing of his right leg. He appears glued to the floor when he “dances” for his audience. If caught on camera standing still, he appears unnaturally immobile.
- The changes in judgment and impulse control have uncovered and perhaps worsened underlying personality traits that others have characterized as narcissistic and antisocial. The changes have led some experts to suggest a diagnosis of “malignant narcissism.”
All of that is apparent. This isn’t just picking a biased doctor to invent a diagnosis — that’s all stuff we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears. His fanatical voters don’t care, the media doesn’t care, he plans to shamble into office like a rot-brained zombie.
I’m still not voting for Genocide Joe.
I would agree with this diagnosis. It’s especially appalling when all the symptoms of a rapidly decompensating mind are listed in clinical detail.
Stress is only going to worsen his decline, and I fully expect that orange one is going to stroke out during one of his ranting episodes. I know those lights are hot, but nobody should turn purple or sweat that much.
Biden has actually done far better than I expected in multiple aspects of his job. Many of his policies and funding initiatives are just getting started in upgrading aging infrastructure and investing in modern manufacturing. For the first time in 50 years we are getting good manufacturing industries and the jobs they provide in the USA, instead of outsourcing all production to other countries.
Locally, my city will be removing and all of its lead water supply lines, including the private portion that connects to each home, using Biden funding.
I’m a little wary of psychiatric diagnosis of a collection of media clips.
You can tell the man is at least morally sick from the words that he says. Nothing further is necessary, and focussing on his tics and slips just distracts from the horror that comes out of his mouth when he is coherent.
Yea and no.
Yes, people like us care that Trump is ill.
But so what. We weren’t going to vote for him anyway, so well or sick or a Zombie, doesn’t much matter.
No.
His fanatical supporters don’t care at all.
The fundies keep saying Trump was chosen by their gods and given to them as a savior. That their god can’t even pick someone who isn’t a shambling wreck doesn’t occur to them.
And, it won’t matter if Trump is wheeled into office comatose.
He will just be a puppet for other people. People like Steve Bannon, Miller, Ted Cruz, Elon Musk, the Koches, Mark Johnson speaker of the House, and the usual far right wingnut christofascists.
Worse case scenario,
Trump completely goes demented and then whoever the Vice President is, ends up as president.
We’ve already been through a lighter version of this.
Reagan wasn’t all that mentally sharp during his second term either. Shortly after that, he was diagnosed with Alzheimers.
Reports from his long time aides and officials is that Trump cannot read
important briefing papers. They have to be dumbed down to short, simple reports with lots of pictures. He has a bad temper and a short attention span. Lots of important persons who have been in his administration have called him an idiot, somebody who is like a small child when it comes to doing his job. This is not new.
He has been doing that for years as president. Trump has proven his unfitness to be president.
It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they don’t believe he’s ill.
The rank and file right doesn’t accept any information from outside the movement. They are all controlled by the woke, Satanic, atheist, baby killing, Jewish, communist, Muslim, Gay cabal. The news and entertainment medias, academia, the scientific establishment; all compromised by “The Left.” (Heh! I fucking wish they actually were instead of profiteering, capitalist, shit.) That footage that shows Trump blithering about? Deep fakes and AI generated footage. If the Jewish can place lasers cannons in space, imagine what they can do with audio and video.
You are not dealing with sane people. They live in a reality of their own invention and they are willing to literally fight, kill, and die for it. The only thing that more disturbing is that most liberals don’t realize this. At least, not enough to do something more vigorous (and permanent) than marching and waving signs at gun-toting fascists.
I doubt that any but a loony fringe of the MAGA cult would ever fight, kill, or die for the cause. Like all loud-mouthed bullies who must resort to threats of violence, they are craven cowards who enjoy saying obnoxious shit for attention.
The undecided voters are not as blind as the cult members.
The shortage of money for the big Trump events is not altogether good; the more opportunities Trump gets to show just how dysfunctional he is, the better. If he forgets Melania’s name yet another time before a big crowd, so much better.
It’s absurd that the media is pretending there is any chance the loser who lost bigly before he started a riot and tried to have Mike Pence lynched has any chance at winning in 2024.
He didn’t even come close last time, and he is barely pulling in 50% of the R votes in those primaries. That number is a good indicator that about 70% percent of registered Republicans won’t vote for him.
I guess he wants 80% of the country to vote Biden, rather than 70%.
Certain offices should have to pass an independent medical assessment. Congressional officers, supreme court justices, the President and VP and a few other senior executive office jobs. The problem is that medicine for keeping people’s body running is getting better, the medicine for keeping people’s brains working isn’t. Too large a percent of the population slips into some degree of dementia or other mental decay while they can still walk around.
The important point is independent. Right now the President does have a physical but he gets to pick the doctor, he can fish around till he finds one that will approve him. There needs to be an independent body that takes care of selecting doctors.
@ 7
Oh? Ever heard of an out-of-the-way town called “Oklahoma City?” Were you off-planet January 6, 2021?
My favorite morbid scenario: this summer, both Biden & Trump surrender to the sands of time, and frantically improvising party leaders plug in Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley as replacement candidates. Faced with the inevitability of a dark-skinned female president, sexoracist and racosexist heads implode across the country, and the rest of us live happily ever after.
@Akira
Are you implying that Timothy McVeigh bombed a building in 1995 because he is a Trump supporter?
2000 maga idiots had a riot, and stormed Congress.
None of them committed any murders. Those that would are very small fringe of people, even among MAGA cultists.
Beholder:
Would Demented Dictator Don be any better for the Palestinians? I say not. Also he’d be much, much worse for you, Beholder.
Biden is slowing down. Trump is breaking down.
Tethys @13: The rioters expressly said they were there to kill Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and other political figures who they believed to be inside the building.
@1 — Then Trump appreciates your vote.
Has Biden nuked any small cities lately? Or carpet-bombed any with incendiaries? (Tokyo, anyone? Dresden?) Successfully liquidated of few million kulaks on the Russian frontier? Opened up any extermination camps resulting in the deaths of three million people? Wiped out a couple million Cambodian citizens with starvation and pickaxes? The word “genocide” has gotten bandied around so much these days it’s lost its meaning. Oh the short memories we have.
And I doubt the Israelis are impressed you think they’re just a bunch of marionettes controlled by “Genocide Joe”.
Tethys 13:
McVeigh acted pre-Trumpism, so the question is moot. But he was definitely a violent right-winger, which is MAGA-ish. How long before Trump praises McVeigh?
The insurrection left behind dead bodies. Call it murder or not if you wish. And who can forget the lynch mob?
Remember and be wary
The Sixth of January
The treason, sedition, and plot.
I know of no reason
Sedition and treason
Should ever be forgot.
@1 one or the other will get voted in regardless. You are choosing not to try to influence the outcome. So that means you can see no greater value in one or the other.
Seems a bit myopic.
@Nathaniel Hellerstein
Yes, 1995 is before 2016. That doesn’t make my question to Akira moot, since he appears to be claiming that Oklahoma was proof that Trump’s supporters will kill for their cult.
His exact words were:
You are not dealing with sane people. They live in a reality of their own invention and they are willing to literally fight, kill, and die for it.
That’s utter bullshit, and a typical example of the violent hyperbole that Akira repeatedly dumps in comment threads.
I’m well aware that people died that disgraceful day, but zero people were in fact murdered by MAGA run wild.
Over 400 have been convicted of various crimes since Jan 6th, but obviously that’s just ‘liberals’ ignoring the problem.
A more charitable interpretation is that the claim is that the two groups share the commonality of a fabricated reality and an attitude though they are not chronologically adjacent.
aka “True Believers”
@John the kibbutzim
I’ve got zero charitable patience with Akira violently spewing nonsense about ‘those people’ and using Oklahoma as proof. Why are you stepping up to defend his latest example of a behavior that has repeatedly been called out for a damn decade? It’s beyond stale.
@17 Dennis K
Just to be clear, you’re saying Israel’s genocide in Gaza is not a genocide?
Tethys,
Because, though I’ve made my share of criticisms about Akira’s attitude and claims over the many many years he and I have both commented here, on the very same basis I critique him I also critique others.
Such as you, in this case.
Now, perhaps I’m being too charitable… but I don’t think so.
[Curious]
Did you intend to mean ‘kibbitzer’ (stander-by opining) or did you literally intend ‘kibbutzim’ (member of a community)?
I know to which interpretation I grant more plausibility, but hey.
Best from the horse’s mouth, no?
(Perhaps Akira could clarify; after all, this is a place where he can vent — and what’s wrong with that?)
@1. beholder : So what are you going to do?
Vote for Trump?
Vote for a third party spoiler who can’t win and will help Trump to win?
Stay home, not vote and enable Trump’s kult members who do go out and vote to vote for him and put Trump back in power?
Yes, these choices all suck and that’s because as said many times before, the USA badly needs significant political reforms – abolish, the EC, have some form of preferential voting , etc .. But its too late this election – which may be the last election becoz y’know the Trump side of politics is actively fascist & working to destroy Democracy in the States. Your terribly flawed and ultimatekly binary American system boils down to this. You pick either Trump or Biden for POTUS this year.
Trump would be a catastrophe for the world as well as for the USA.
So seriously, which choice are you making? What will you actually do?
Will you consider the consequences for everyone of making the wrong choice and supporting Trump’s take over of the USA here?
beholder, I made a comment earlier today regarding that elsethread.
Here: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/01/07/infinite-thread-xxx/comment-page-7/#comment-2216010
(the times, they are a-changing)
StevoR @26, heh.
Reginald Selkirk also addressed that there.
Here: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/01/07/infinite-thread-xxx/comment-page-7/#comment-2216033
I certainly don’t.
I’m still extremely skeptical of the claim that Trump is in some way ill. Virtually every supposed symptom of his “illness” is identical to the behavioral evolution you’d expect from someone who:
1.) is a lifelong bigot
2.) is extremely lazy
3.) is a malignant narcissist who has both reached highest heights of political power and become the leader-for-life of a massive death cult
4.) has been surrounded by nothing but obsequious toadies and yes-men his entire life, a problem that’s become exponentially worse since he became a cult leader
So no, given all that I don’t give the most infinitesimal fuck whether or not he’s sick. We’re talking about a man who sacrificed the lives of hundreds of thousands of the people he was oath-bound to protect for the sake of his ego, and who has sworn to round up the “vermin” who doubt his perfection and perpetrate a bloodbath if he’s given the power again.
He’ll do it, too, “sick” or not.
And a PSA for the people in this thread saying he doesn’t have a chance:
While I’m impressed that someone who was apparently born in-or-after 2017 has taken an interest in politics, maybe you leave the commentary to people who will be old enough to vote come November.
See, kiddo, we did this whole song and dance before the last time Trump was elected president. Practically everybody said he didn’t have a chance back then and yet, and yet, that rancid pusbag was elected, and served out his full 4-year term despite numerous investigations into his criminal misconduct and an impeachment.
The short version of what happened is that our institutions were set up to heavily favor a man like him and, guess what? They’re even more tilted in his favor this time! His victory is by no means guaranteed, but he abso-fucking-lutely has a chance of becoming our president again. A very good one. The ratfuckers are already out in force, and believe you me, they’ve got a hell of an October surprise planned. Trump could easily become president again.
If we treat this possibility with the seriousness is deserves, we can probably stop that from happening. On the hand, if we sit back and say “it can’t happen here” it will happen again, and it will be so much worse than you could ever imagine.
Crossposted from the endless thread, the economic shenagians of Trump.
‘Jon Stewart Deconstructs Trump’s “Victimless” $450 Million Fraud | The Daily Show ‘
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=EDMinX6t1Zk
PS. We have a pretty good idea of what the consequences of a second and even worse Trump term will be. You’re probly already aware of some of them but for the record :
The Trump 2nd term agenda outlined in ..
Source : https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/21/jeff_sharlet_trump_blood_poisoning_project2025
Source : https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/26/trump-russia-putin/
Perhaps most importantly of all :
Source : https://johnmenadue.com/a-republican-victory-in-2024-will-be-a-climate-disaster/
After what happened in 2016; Democratic people, sane and decent people, cannot, cannot, cannot be complacant. Democratic party nominee Biden is the ONLY actual alternative to Trump .
vucodlak, fine line between grim warning and defeatism, which maybe you walk.
But then, we did this whole song and dance before the last time Trump was not elected president. Practically everybody said he didn’t have a chance back then and yet, and yet, that rancid pusbag was not elected [2020] , and did not served out a full 4-year term despite numerous investigations into his criminal misconduct and an impeachment, which are now coming to a head.
@29. Tethys :
Numbers added for clarity.
.1 So those chants of hanging Mike Pence where just for LOLz? If they’d found him or AOC or pretty much any congresscritter they’d have just been like “lol, pysche, scared ya?” They had a gallows prepared & ready for use, they attacked police brutally and forced armed officers to run. Forced even their supporters and enablers like Josh Hawley to flee for their lives in terror.* One person was shot dead attempting to attack congress reps and those protecting them. That no one was actually murdered by the MAGA traitors and would-be murderers that day is down to luck and Eugene Goodman’s courage and quick thinking. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Goodman )
.2 Um, that second sentence doesn’t seem to fit with your first one. Yes? The MAGA mob wer eviolent criminals and also in some cases literal nazis and violent political extremists who attempted a coup on jan 6th I have no doubt they would have killed if they had found the people they were hunting and no one in Congress doubted it – at leats not at that time. Do youthink if penc ehad been found and caught they wouldn’t have lynched him? Really?
.* So what does that make them and why aren’t they treated accordingly?
@29. vucodlak :
Quoting for Truth. Well said & seconded.
Note that Tump is now currently widely seen as the favourite and most likely to win and become POTUS again.
@ 9 Tethys :
See words above. After 2016? For real? You do recall what the polls said the days and weeks before Hilary Rodham Clinton didn’t get elected- despite having the most votes! – right?
As you probly know, its not what the polls say, its what the voters who turn out on the day choose and even then you have the undemocratic abomination of the Electoral College that robbed HRC among others and a system heavily rigged in the rural reichwing, unrepresentative regressives favour.
Trump winning isn’ just a disturbing possibility. Its looking like the most probable outcome at this stage. That should scare you and motivate you to do all you can to stop it happening. Complacancy and apathy and lettingthe perfect be the enemy of the good are very much NOT warranted at all here.
Probably, beholder @ # 1’s purism probably doesn’t merit the attention it’s received already.
Unless beholder lives in a swing state, their vote means practically nothing on a national level. The Constitution and the winner-take-all implementation of the corrupted Electoral College scheme mean most of our votes count only in a statistical sense, not in terms of who actually gets the White House.
Whatcha say, beholder? Where you at? Is your vote (or surrender thereof) worth anybody’s time?
These people support him BECAUSE T—p is sick. He doesn’t have to DO anything at all, finally, just as the huge majority of T—p voters doesn’t care what actually happens, so long as their bawling pettiness gets expressed.
And they won’t care, most even when the economy REALLY crashes and the PRC really becomes an even more dominant and unpleasant power. Consequences are the fault of everyone else.
PS. Beholder – you’re SO pure! SO good! Please may I never be anywhere nearly as pure and good as you see yourself.
@1. beholder : FYI Trump is completely behind Israel and has stated that he wants Israel to “.. finish the problem.”
Source : https://newrepublic.com/post/179569/trump-finish-problem-gaza-israel
Yep. No matter what people say or how the polls look, there’s a chance and it would be foolish to gamble with that.
And aside from the obvious fraud attempts and law suits, there’s also the fact that Trump will not accept a loss. He may not have the pull to actually overturn the result, but he’ll try. His supporters may be too weak and too few to do much, but they will try. It may not be another Jan6, but it’ll be something.
Are you from the US, Tethys or, at all, familiar with the history of this country?
The willfully delusional, such as Trump’s cult followers, should be considered potentially very dangerous especially since they follow a man who shows no compunction in calling for the overthrow of any democratic process that doesn’t go his way.
Sorry but the diagnosis seems biased and thus does not look very professional.
Trump is a privileged little shit who learned to be an asshole and get away with it long time. These points from the diagnosis seem very politically motivated rather than clinical.
There’s no need to be obtuse, Tethys. Just admit you’re a fascist sympathizer.
Dementia is a serious disorder. And it doesn’t manifest like flipping a switch. You have bad days, normal-ish days, and days where your head feels like it’s full of glue. It gets harder to communicate and you get frustrated when you make more mistakes.
Trump is also an exceptionally ignorant asshole. The dementia stacks on that and no doubt it makes him less predictable and more unpleasant. The republicans had the same problem with Reagan and were able to use him as a sort of wax effigy they could enact policies around and blame. In that sense Trump is a perfect republican candidate. But lets all hope that his democratic opponent can beat him. Biden is a genocidal antique but maybe he can have a heart attack and leave our first black woman president to remind us that just being a black woman does not make you a great candidate.
PS – I live in a swing state and will vote against Trump. I don’t want to think of it as voting for Biden.
That is true.
I’m seeing this now with a 90 year old woman with a slowly progressing dementia.
A lot of days she is just out of it.
Some days she is confused and thought her son was some guy she last saw 70 years ago in a city 1,000 miles away.
And, every once in a while, she manages to get things together and for a few hours or a day, she is alert, oriented, and knows who everyone is and what is happening to her.
It’s eerie.
Raven @ 44
Dementia sucks.
Ignoring the Orange One for a moment…
Non-mammalian species seem to not get senescent, at least not the same way. They might have short life spans but ageing manifests differently. It might help a lot to compare genomes.
And as a few mammals have solved how to grow old in a healthy way (one species gets more than 200 years old) ageing gracefully is not only something non-mammalian species have worked out.
Another thing – research about dementia – especially alzheimers- is really taking off now after a century of disappointments. There are finally several avenues of research.
Also, neurodegenerstive conditions like Huntingtons and Parkinsons disease are getting untangled.
While it is possible that this is the last election in the US if Trump wins it probably will not be,
If Biden loses because of his pro-genocide stance it is possible that this will have an effect on the Democratic party’s overall policies in the future because they generally want to win elections.
Similarly, if Biden wins despite being pro-genocide the party may take the lesson that voters are okay with this policy and continue to run pro-genocide candidates in the future.
Electoral victories and defeats do shape parties.
So I find the idea that there is no moral case to make for not voting for Biden uncompelling. You can certainly argue that the harm of another Trump term outweighs this but it is a valid thing to consider.
specialffrog @ # 46: … if Biden wins despite being pro-genocide the party may take the lesson that voters are okay with this policy and continue to run pro-genocide candidates …
We know that voters will decide on a range of issues, that “pundits” and low-info voters alike will interpret the results according to prior biases (turned up by 12 by the Murdoch lie machine & its imitators), and that – as with Clinton-Trump almost eight years ago – we will never find a single definitive factor to explain the (probably very close) outcome.
Your “moral case” disappears behind the fog – and the smoke-&-mirrors.
Well, yes, there is reason for concern when a president or presidential candidate is ill. But what really concerns me, is when he is evil.
With Trump, you’re going to get two genocides, not one. He’s not going to do anything to stop Israel flattening Gaza, and he’s going to withdraw all financial and military support from Ukraine. Putin’s stated ultimate goal for the invasion is the total eradication of Ukraine as a nation, a people, and identity, and he doesn’t care how many people he has to kill to achieve it.
Then that means that Trump won because of his pro-genocide stance. While it is possible that Democrats will learn the right lesson from that, they probably won’t. I mean, they haven’t so far, have they?
And that’s assuming that you’re right about there still being any real elections after another four years of Trump; something that is most definitely not a sure thing, no matter how cavalier you are about it.
Finally, please consider that it’s not just your own country you’re gambling with. There’s a whole world of us out here who will be screwed over if you people drop the ball. Again.
Biden is not pro-genocide. What fucking nonsense.
@51 Crip Dyke
He may not think of himself as pro-genocide (who the fuck knows the answer to that), but he chooses not to stop an ongoing genocide.
Look, I can’t help the fact that team D is coping hard with having anointed a monumentally shitty presidential candidate, or that you’ve chosen to cope with a campaign of fear and by turning the Orange Man Bad dial up to 11. That’s your problem, not mine. I am going to vote third party in November like I did in 2012, 2016, and 2020, and this time I won’t vote for any congressional candidates who support funding for Israel. There are at least a few hundred thousand people who think the way I do and we live in all fifty states — I’m just letting you know ahead of time that you’re going to lose, and it will be across the board in downballot races too. It may not be the conviction at the Hague that Biden and his cronies deserve, but a decisive defeat for the Democratic Party in November is at least a little bit of justice.
Oh no, beholder is gonna hold their breath until they turn blue because Biden is not actually the head of state of Israel.
Trolls are known for stupidity. Beholder is a stellar example of the type.
Behold, beholder:
You are exceedingly mistaken. At best.
First, Trump is far more amenable to supporting Israel (and did so during his tenure) than Biden; and
Second, it’s one or the other; third parties are at best spoilers.
“No third-party candidate has won the presidency since the Republican Party became the second major party in 1856.” as per Wikipedia and therefore, if the Democratic Party are defeated, the Republican nominee will be Prez. Trump.
Gotta remember a fat part of Trump’s Rump is the evangelical movement — the old-timey end-times freaks, as noted by Akira.
So, you are basically endorsing a Trump victory, and the means by which you are essaying that is to try to convince people to not vote for the Democratic Party candidate. Which is what Vicar and others have been trying to do for ages.
(There’s a non-zero chance — let’s call it ‘iota’ — that you don’t realise that’s what you’re doing)
… And Trump has clearly stated that he will encourage the ongoing genocide …
Given that your posts are all “Biden Bad dial up to 11”, I’m not sure you have a basis for criticism.
If you really actually want less genocide rather than more genocide, maybe it’s kinda your problem as well? Or are you actually indifferent to genocide?
. . . So, too diffuse to make a difference in any single state.
Don’t you mean we’re going to lose? That is, no matter who wins, your third party will absolutely definitely lose?
Because a Republican victory will lead to domestic and foreign policies throughout the US that are dedicated to more justice?
Senior Israeli officials have literally said they couldn’t keep the bombing going without a steady supply of US weapons. Biden has bent over backwards to keep the supplies flowing, even bypassing congress to do so.
Unlike Trump, Biden is not an idiot. If consequences are predictable one can assume they are intended.
Bit like the difference between the respective documents cases between Biden and Trump, the Israel issue.
Never mind regular mendacity and lack of honour. Etc.
(One is far, far more egregious than the other, and that one is not Biden)
@ ^ beholder : So effectively you will be helping Trump to win and to genocide Ukraine as well as #49. tacitus correctly observes. You willalso be hurting progressives, pregant people, trans people, LGBTQUIA people, helping Global Overheating destroy the planet we live on, hurting what already barely passes for Democracy in the USA, worsening SCOTUS even more and more. The message that will be taken from your third party pro-Trump vote is the same one that was be taken from the Nader voters of the 2000 election. (Were you alive then? Do you remember that?) That is that purist third spoiler parties are a good cynical political tactic to help defeat actual left wing or even just not extreme reichwing parties. Did Nader and his role in Gore’s defat (Oh yeah, EC hurt once again too! Another topic..) drive the Democratic party leftwards or help progressives at all? No. It did not. Quite the reverse. The whole country went further reichwing and also into Iraq with devastating consequences for the region and world broadly.
You are choosing poorly and hurting yourself and more importantly hurting a lot of other innocent people who don’t get the choice as well.
If you want to vote third party first reform the system so you get preferential (ranked choice) voting or run-off elections or suchlike. Until you have something better than the current American first past the post system where third parties will only ever be spoilers hurting the better and helping the worst at the expense of the ideal best.Right now, if you vote 3rd party or stay home or do anything other than vote for Biden, then you help Trump seize power. That’s the plain ugly mathematical reality.
specialffrog, if you can’t sense the change of rhetoric that’s happening in that regard, you’re not paying much attention. Overton window type of thing. For example, the USA always hitherto vetoed in support of Israel’s brutality, but not most recently.
In fact… <clickety-click>
(https://www.newsweek.com/hamas-hails-bidens-clear-changes-israel-policy-1883665)
[food drops and shipments are something the USA has done — symbolic and tokenistic in practice, but politically significant. Israel, meantime, does all it can to prevent aid from arriving to Gaza]
[grr. Better clarify.
symbolic and tokenistic in practice given the scale of the manufactured famine, but beneficial and potentially life-saving for tens of thousands of starving people.
I did not mean to imply that aid was worthless, not at all.
“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.”]
If ending the genocide of Gaza is your goal, then contacting your Federal representatives and lobbying the Biden administration NOW would seem a far more reasonable and effective method than waiting until November to sacrifice your vote in protest.
@morales: that’s all very well. But if this is a serious shift why not turn off the spigot of money and weapons? And if the US is not willing to do that is this just trying to shift perception rather than a real policy change?
specialffrog, I don’t know any specifics. I do know Presidents aren’t Kings.
Realpolitik, presumably. Socio-cultural-political-religious inertia. Business ties. Appeal to tradition.
Defence ties.
specialfrog
Exactly which third party are you planning on voting for?
Lots of freethought going on in this thread. Shout out to specialffrog: they may not necessarily endorse my views, but they understand where I’m coming from.
@54 JM
Yes, Vicar seems to have the right idea. I may not agree with him w.r.t. the alleged superiority of Apple’s consumer electronics, but his political rants are a much needed breath of fresh air on this blog.
@55 Owlmirror
Hard to say. StevoR doesn’t seem to agree, he’s still mired in the conspiracy theory that Nader handed the election to Bush (no he didn’t, by the way, the 2000 election was stolen and the Supreme Court appointed Bush).
As far as I can tell, Biden serves his corporate paymasters just as he did previously as Senator Credit Card, trying to get away with as much criminal bullshit as he possibly can while pissing off just under 50% of the country. He’s playing to the margins, in other words, and he needs every vote he can get. That possibly gives me and the rest of my bloc leverage by threatening not to vote for him.
Hint to Team D: If I pledge to vote for him like a goody-two-shoes authoritarian Democrat, Biden has no incentive to respond to my political demands.
@58 StevoR
Seeing as how Biden has given the green light to wipe out pregnant women, trans people, and LGBTQUIA people in Gaza, I don’t believe he has the moral consistency to stick up for underrepresented groups when they need the support. I’m not even convinced he cares about the lives of ordinary Ukrainians besides their utility as cannon fodder for NATO.
Nice try, Boomer. Yes, I was alive then. I would like to say I would have voted Nader at the time, but I was 12 years old and I had other important shit to do.
We’ll see. At least I have the moral convictions not to choose a genocidal monster.
@59 JM
I’ll go with John Kirby’s assessment on the resolution:
In other words, we accomplished jack shit and pro-genocide propagandists are cynically using it to pat themselves on the back. Get back to me when Biden chooses not to veto a U.N. resolution with some teeth.
beholder:
You clearly don’t get it.
Here, for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
It used to be unthinkable that Israel could be criticised by the US.
Not any more.
Hm. Try an analogy.
Ever done any calculus? Think of this as a point of inflection.
Of course, what do I know?
I know this much: bad as its formulation may be, the USA is still a form of democracy.
So, if Trump wins (thanks in no small amount to people such as you) then, well… that’s the whole point.
The voters, at the end of the day, vote. The electorate will have spoken.
You’ll get the government you deserve.
[related]
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/trump-jews-israel-democrat-religion-antisemitism-gorka.html
—
Huh. The very argument being made by certain posters in this very thread.
A coincidence, probably. ;)
@ John Morales, #32
I’m an optimist. We are not yet lost. We can win, but that doesn’t mean that victory, or even survival, is guaranteed. Now is the time to fight like hell, because tomorrow may be too late. The worst really are full of passionate sincerity, and they really do mean to do all the terrible things they’ve been saying they’ll do if given the chance.
Trump had the stench of several hundred thousand dead hanging around him in 2020. Here in 2024, a huge chunk of the population prefers to forget that Covid-19 (and pretty much everything about that year) ever happened. It certainly isn’t everyone, or even a majority, but it doesn’t have to be a majority of the US population. It just has to be a few thousand people in swing states.
I hear it everywhere I go around here: people claiming that they don’t like this and that about Trump, and how they wish there were other choices, but they might just “have to” vote for Trump anyway. A lot of these people were never reachable by Biden, true, but I know some of them voted for Biden in 2020.
You know what the #1 issue I hear these people complain about when it comes to Biden? “The border.” Immigration. We’re over a thousand miles from the border in any direction here; immigration has zero effect on the lives of 99% of these leaning-Trump voters. But, you see, the “crisis at the border” has been top of the news for months now, and every bit of news coverage includes quotes from lying Republican assholes saying Biden is causing an “invasion.”
The #2 issue is that Biden is old, which is somehow not a criticism these people will level at Trump. The MainStream Media has had weeks of stories about Special Counsel Hur’s report saying that Biden is a confused old man. The MSM doesn’t bother fact-checking this report. They just repeat the claim, and bolster it with polls showing that a majority of Americans also think that Biden is old.
The #3 issue is that they can’t name a single thing that Biden has done. The MSM barely reports on the Biden administration’s fairly impressive list of accomplishments, because they’re not as exciting as the shitshow that was the Trump administration. They’re just good, solid domestic policy, and most of the programs have been designed to help people who aren’t rich.
Meanwhile, Trump is ranting and raging about exterminating the “vermin” who oppose him, and our MSM barely makes a peep about it. They rarely report on Trump’s nonsensical ramblings. I’ve heard some claim that this means that they’ve learned their lesson from the results of all the free press they gave him in the run up to the 2016 election, but I don’t buy that for a second.
If the MSM reported honestly on Trump’s plans, it would hurt his chances in the general election. The MSM wants it to be a close election. Some in the MSM obviously want him to win, because they find Biden boring. The MSM wants its horserace. They want the razzledazzle, even if it ends up with them lined up against the wall with the rest of us vermin.
Tl;dr- the people who swing elections in the US have short memories. They don’t remember how bad it was under Trump, and they aren’t well-informed enough to know how much better things are now. This election is a lot more like 2016 than 2020.
@52. beholder :
Team D? We are NOT talking about some kinda sports event where you have competing teams playing for ultimately inconsequential (at least to everyone outside the sports) prizes. The “teams” here don’t get a medal or a cup or prize money – they get to determine the future through things like who has lifetime SCOTUS appointments and which if any countries get invaded or not and which people get healthcare, what sort of education people have, et cetera.. We’re talking about a political party here one of two (& only 2 in the reality & USo A political system you have there) that actually get to govern the Two Party state that is the US of A. The name of this political party is the Democratic party and they are the left wing party by USA standards. So, IOW, relatively centre right by the much of the world’s political standards but at least not the delusional, fascist far reichwing party that the Trumpublicans have become.
Who is currently the incumbent sitting President of the United States because he won the last election defeating Trump in 2020. Real “shitty” huh? Now there’s arguments to be made that he’s too old and about his policies but seriously? The candidate that won last time and is currently POTUS should, well, what? Be forced by their party to step down you think? You think that wouldn’t have political impacts that make it harder for the democratic party to win and wouldn’t be used as ammunition by the far reichwing Trump kult paprty to gain power and hurt people and the future for everyone?
Now, I happen to think that Biden should’ve chosen to step aside and let Kamala Harris take over. I do think its time for a younger generation that are more up to date, more progressive and vigourous and inspiring to be in charge. Biden certainly has his flaws. But short of having a major health issue force him out, he was realistically never going to be toppled as POTUS and would have needed to have been persauded to step down. That hasn’t happened obvs and won’t happen now. I would’ve prefered a different candidate too, but that’s life.
BTW. Who would you rather see running as the Democratic nominee and would they have a better or worse chance of actually winning this upcoming election or the last one? More progressive candidates, sadly, don’t get the support of enough people to win elections inside the Democratic party. So. Outside of the USA’s more leftwing party in a general election they’d do better? Really? What would make you think that?
Did you vote in the Democratic primaries Beholder? Did you join and work and try to advocate and push for your preferred candidates and try to get change from within where you might have a chance of making some difference? Did you try and push for political reforms from within or outside the Democratic party? Have you actually done anything other than whinge and complain and threaten to hold your breath and throw your vote away and hurt others by chucking your voting away in a tantrum if you don’t get your ideal choice?
PS. Meta : To be continued – avoiding wall of text, TLDR hopefully. Well, breaking it up a bit.
[Biden is 3½ years older than Trump — a difference of 4% — and Trump is now as old as Biden was when he got elected]
Continuing @beholder#52 :
You think Trump isn’t as bad as we’re warning you? What’s your basis and evidence for that claim? Please show your reasoning and explain why.
I’ve already provided info to you in #31 & #37 here. You saw what happened in the attempted Coup of January 6th; you presumably follow the news at least a bit. You recall that Trump “joked” about becoming a dictator, terminating the US Constituition and more. Hell, you recall him calling White Supremacist actual Nazis, Klansmen, Slaver Taraitors and people wanting to lynch his own VP for not doing what Trump wanted “very fine people” who he loves, right? Right? Yet you think the warnings you’ve been given aren’t serious and Trump isn’t as bad as we’re pointing out? What do you expect from four years of Trump and his Christianist extremist fascists in power – at least four more years and likely more because, remember the Repugs are working on destroying Democracy in the US of A. You doubt that?
Please read and think! :
Source : https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/5/8/republicans-are-pushing-american-democracy-to-its-breaking-point
Plus see :
Source : https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/donald-trumps-plot-against-america/
In addition to :
Source : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-rebuked-for-call-to-terminate-constitution-over-2020-election-results
We know exactly what they’ve chosen and, of course, the Repugs have been rigging elections through voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, dirty tricks and, also of bloody course, the Electoral College for decades already anyhow. Throw your vote away this time and maybe you won’t need to worry about ever wasting – or having a choice to – vote again.
It’ll do something different? FFS! You lived through and saw what happened in 2016 and have learnt NOTHING from it?
If voting third party was going to help or achieve anything it would’ve done so by now. Would done something when Gore lost because of it, when HRC lost because of it. Did it? What gain did you get by it? What sort of world and past that has lingering consequences still today did Bush and Trump getting elected do? You know where it leads and what it does and are going to .. fulfil the actual fucking definition of insanity by your own choice here again this time?
Who will you vote for? What result will that have? See previous fucking paragraph. Stop and think, grow the fuck up and reconsider please.
Everyone loses. You, me, the world. If Biden doesn’t get in and Trump does. See Climate link provided for you already in #31.
No. It’s NOT going to be any justice because, well, read this whole comment and #31 and more here as well.If Biden is punished, it sure won’t be for anything to do with Israel. You’ll be enabling another genocide to happen this time in Ukraine. Putin will win, Trump will win and a lot of innocent people will die if the corrosive counter-productive stupidity of voting for third parties or staying home or just NOT voting for Biden makes the difference as it did in 2000 and 2016. The world is running out of time to act on Climate if it hasn’t already. Democracy is being push ed perilously close to its breaking point inthe USA. We cannot afford the time or cost or inhumanity of another Trump term – or an endless Trumpist / Christianist White Supremacist dictatorship in the rogue superpower that is the USA.
@ 66. beholder :
.1) You think Trumpo is better in this area? Wer enot tlaking gza her eeither but the USA and the rest of the planet.
.2) Oh great , youre a fucking tankie too are you? Yet youaccuse me of Conspiracy theory?
More than one reason and thing can happen and YES, Nader cost Gpor evaluable votes that would’ve given him Florida and the election win.
I’m Gen X actually and didn’t you just say you voted for third parties then?
Except that’s EXACT:LY what you are doing and a farworse one than Biden.
^ Typo fix for clarity :
You think Trump is better in this area? We’re not talking only Gaza here either but the USA and the rest of the planet!
Nader cost Gore valuable votes that would’ve given him Florida and the election win.
Source : https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-nader-effect/
Emphasis added for the willfully deluded.
Basic. Maths : Can you do it, beholder?
Nader got 97,488 votes.
Pretty safe to say the vast majority of those ninety-seven thousand, four-hundred and eighty-eight votes would’ve gone to Gore instead if Nader had not run.
Al Gore needed a mere five hundred and thirty eight votes to win Florida and consequently the 2000 Presidential election.
(Also note that Nader – according to the article linked above – cost Gore 5 more states and the very obvs election win that would have given him had Gore won all those and Florida too.)
What part of that is a “conspiracy” exactly? What part of that simple equation don’t you understand?
Mathematical fact : Had Nader NOT run Gore would’ve become POTUS in 2000 and the world would be a different and better place. Thát’s the cost for everyone – including many millions of dead iraqi civilians – that third party spoilers like you have had on us all. On the world.
Change your damn rotten system USA! Have an option where you could have voted 1 Nader and still get Gore instead of making Bush POTUS; where you could vote, I dunno, Jill Stein maybe (or whoever) 1 and get Biden and NOT Trump now. That’d be ideal. Or have a French style run-off system where you have a first round with multiple parties, you vote your first leftwing preference in round 1, they get eliminated and then it comes down to the binary choice you have right now between Biden and Trump and you can send a message in round 1 and then get the better of the two possible choices in round 2. Second one seems messier, costlier and more of a pain than just preferential ranked choice voting to me, but whatever. Do that and fine, no probs. I mean the ultimate choices will still suck becoz politics and reality and a large willfully ignorant section of population misguided by Murdoch media, etc.. but at least you stop the spoilers wrecking it for reasonable people and the rest of the planet.
Right now, its too late for those reforms tho.’You didn’t make them happen in time. Not an option.
So you get a binary choice this year – either Trump OR Biden. One of those will be elected POTUS.
Doing anything other than voting for Biden helps Trump win, So you beholder, will be helping Trump win. De facto voting for a genocidal monster.
I don’t share your opinion that Biden is a “genocidal monster” but, for the sake of argument, let’s say you are right.
Trump is unquestionably a worse genocidal monster who is more extreme than Biden and actively vengefully, maliciously sadistically, evil. An open fascist, a puppet of Putin and a science denier who has already cost millions of Americans their lives in the Covid pandemic.
You have a chocie of two genocidal monsters and your vote will enable not one but two genocides and do a lot more damage to a lot more people and end Democracy in the USoA. Plus help destroy the planet due to Global Overheating which I note you have ignored.
Again, beholder, if you don’t vote Biden then you are helping a truly worse genocidal and literally fascist monster to take power.
What fucking part of this do you fail to comprehend?
@beholder
In extension of StevoR #71 and given your refusal to vote for Democrats, I’m curious: What have you been doing for the past four years to make a third-party candidate more viable?
Clearly, simply voting every so often isn’t going to change anything and you’re surely smart enough to know that. The system is rigged in favor of the established parties. First past the post voting, combined with the electoral college makes a third-party candidate a complete pipe dream.
Said in another way: Given that in January ’25 either Trump or Biden will be sworn in as president, what’s your plan for having better options in ’28?
This comments section is hilarious, which is good because there’s not a lot to laugh about in politics these days.
I see that the Democrats are now only just barely avoiding saying out loud “the Palestinians must die to save America”, which is literally what they are saying by continuing to support Biden. The next time I see one of you referencing The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas or quoting Ursula K. Le Guin, which you just loved to do four years ago, I’ll try to remember to laugh hysterically, just as I do these days when I see you guys quoting Terry Pratchett.
Incidentally: somebody up there — I’m in a bit of a hurry right now and I have a lot to say, so I am not going to scroll back up to look for it — said that Biden wasn’t a king so there was nothing he could do to stop Israel by himself. This is either near-total ignorance of how American politics work or a deliberate big fat lie. First (and trivially): although the budget is approved by Congress, it is created by the President. Biden could hold Israel’s funding — which is enormous on an annual basis and obscene on a cumulative one — hostage to demand change, which literally every President has apparently done to them for at least 4 decades including Trump. (Trump literally gave Israel fewer political concessions than Biden!) But further than that: Biden has used the Santos trick (making large numbers of transfers which are just below the reporting threshold) to send arms to Israel more than 90 times already without going to Congress for approval. He has asked Congress to do away with reporting entirely so he can send them more weapons — he didn’t even make that request for Ukraine in a year and a half, but he was making it within three months of Israel beginning its genocide. He and his representatives have repeatedly lied in statements to the press in order to support Israel — for example, he claimed to have seen photos of events which Israel (and the NYT, which published those claims as fact without doing any checking) has now admitted were lies*. He absolutely can tell the US representative at the UN how to vote, and the US has been consistently voting alongside Israel literally against basically the entire rest of the world, repeatedly. The more evil weapons that Israel is using — like white phosphorus — are literally only made in the US; he could absolutely stop those exports. Basically everyone involved in relief efforts has come to the conclusion that Biden is on board for genocide and ethnic cleansing (as are, obviously, all people who support him) — that, in fact, when he said post-October-7 that “if there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one”, he was stating his true thoughts and that this outright genocide and theft is actually bipartisan US policy being carried out by proxy. If this does not disgust you beyond words, then we have nothing in common and you are not even remotely on “my side” in politics.
*Incidentally: as I predicted right here in the comments section on this blog a month or so back, the claim that Hamas was raping Israelis on October 7 turned out to be a lie — just like the claim that Hamas killed babies — and the NYT, which provided critical media support for the claim and made an editorial decision to internally bar investigations into the claims, finally buried an implicit retraction of the claim in a story recently. The only rape going on in the area which is actually attested and for which there is any evidence is the many, many cases of rape by IDF forces of Palestinians, which officials from the UN, Doctors Without Borders, and the US have all said are going on but about which we don’t seem to hear very much.
If you’ve followed all the retractions and modifications to the Official Israeli Story, then you already know that it is now: “We knew there was an attack coming on October 7, and approximately where it would happen, but we told the Nova Music Festival organizers to keep things going through that date despite their original plans to end earlier than that, presumably in hopes of getting civilians killed. Hamas didn’t rape anybody or target women or children or babies, most of the people killed were actually Israeli military personnel. We admit that our own forces killed so many of the people who died that day that they were probably responsible for a majority of the deaths, the same way that they were responsible for the deaths of hostages that Hamas tried to release but who we refused to accept, who were unarmed and had their hands in the air when they were shot by our troops. Our troops have been stealing money and goods from the homes of the Palestinians who have fled the bombing, and we were literally running a snuff porn video site online so our civilians and troops not in combat could watch Palestinians being killed, which they did with enthusiasm as evidenced by the many, many comments on those videos. We have been digging up Palestinian graveyards, bodies of Palestinians who died in our custody — and we have taken many thousands of hostages since October 7 — are returned missing organs, and we routinely shoot anybody who tries to claim food provided from outside. We have even made it illegal for Palestinians to collect rainwater to drink. We have literally attacked every single hospital and college in Gaza, some of them multiple times. We have literally admitted that we deliberately target both journalists who are trying to provide coverage and their families if we can, in order to discourage the world from trying to see what we’re doing. We admit that we literally tortured UNRWA employees to force them to claim that the agency has members of Hamas on staff in order to get other countries to stop funding them, and that the claim is false. We have already started stealing more land, in larger chunks than we have done since the 1940s, and we have already sold the offshore resource extraction rights to Gaza. We’ve also launched attacks against basically every one of our neighbors, and have displayed maps showing that we intend to annex land from all of them next. Everything we are doing in this sphere, incidentally, has over 60% approval by the citizen body according to polls — most of the resistance to Netanyahu is from people who think he is not being violent enough.”
Frankly, none of the countries the US has invaded since the end of World War II were as evil as Israel is. For the US — and specifically Biden, who has the personal ability to take action — not only not to declare them enemies but to continue to support them is so completely disgusting that it makes a moral leper of anybody willing to vote for any of the wretches who do this.
Oh, incidentally: you know that Project 2025 thing that the Democrats are trying to use to scare people into voting for them? Biden’s positions on Israel are exactly what Project 2025 says should be done. (As are his sales of drilling permits for fossil fuels on public lands, at which his administration has set a record — more drilling okayed than by Reagan, either Bush, or Trump, just like we’re spending more on the military budget — even without counting military aid to Ukraine or Israel — than we did under Reagan, either Bush, or Trump.) (Oh, and speaking of environmental impact: the worldwide heat records we’ve been seeing in the last several months are almost certainly linked to Israel’s genocide. They’ve definitely released more greenhouse gases since October 7 than a laundry list of countries do on an annual basis, and the number may be higher. Israel is literally killing the entire planet, and you guys are willing to help them do it. They’ve also dropped more than 7 times as much megatonnage of explosives as the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, which is certainly an interesting factoid.)
This is the first time in my adult life when I have not bothered to vote in the Democratic Primary. The fact that the Democrats refused to hold any primary debates — in order to protect Biden from criticism or unfortunate comparisons — and a majority of the party very clearly wants him to run again, combined with the fact that a staggering majority of Democrats in Congress have been voting for Israel’s interests over and over again — right up to the “no funding for UNRWA until at least 2025, even though we know the claims about it were false” measure just now — means that the party has very definitely moved so far to the right, and in such a blatantly sociopathic way, that I am not welcome and cannot be accommodated. I would no sooner think of voting for Democrats any more than I would think of voting for Republicans; they are morally indistinguishable even though their policies may be different — Republicans want some pain to be felt by (some types of) white people Over Here In The Imperial Core, whereas Democrats want to concentrate it all on brown people, primarily — but not exclusively — abroad. A distinction without a moral difference. (And if I hadn’t already come to that conclusion, then the words of people like StevoR above would definitely convince me. You guys, like the Israelis, are so far gone that you no longer even realize how you sound to people who aren’t sociopaths.)
Frankly: the more you guys back Biden, the more I think the US needs to be destroyed, even though it will almost certainly take me with it. You claim Trump will destroy the country? The longer Biden and the crew of evil cretins in Congress go on, the better that sounds. If you really do believe that your only chance of saving the world is to get my vote, then your only hope is to get rid of not only Biden but a majority of the incumbents in Congress — and not just to keep them off the ballot but to have the party actively repudiate them. Even if I thought that even the best of Democrats were willing to consider that kind of change, the things most Democrats are saying — as in this comments section — make it clear that it’s less likely to happen than a third-party candidate winning the White House (there are a hell of a lot of voters who hate both Trump and Biden, after all, but basically no Democrats willing to repudiate Biden), so I’m not bothering to waste my time trying to make it happen. You yourselves make it clear that trying to produce “change within the system” is a waste of everybody’s time, because you are clinging to people who are not merely wrong but totally morally and ethically repugnant. Liars and thieves who are willing to sacrifice the whole world for Israel. Fuck them, and fuck you.
Who am I going to vote for? Definitely a third party, if I bother to turn out. I’d rather have the infinitesimally small chance that they will win and do something worthwhile than the total certainty that Biden and the genocide-enablers in Congress will refuse to do anything worthwhile, which is what the Democrats have on offer (and have had on offer for decades now, if we’re going to be honest). But I recognize that that’s unlikely at best, precisely because so many of you are willfully embracing sociopathy, so this may also be the first time in my adult life that I won’t even bother to vote in the federal election. You guys are just too much.
I am not going to vote for Franz von Papen because I am to his left.
You’re not Geralt of Rivia. If you have to choose between to evils, you choose the lesser one.
*two evils
@77 Vicar spittin’ FACTS
Your comment was the intro this blog post needed. But no, pay no attention to the substantial points that compel us to stand against Genocide Joe and the indistinguishable-evil-working-on-greater-evil that is the Democratic Party — sweep all that under the rug. He must just be too old, or something.
@75 StevOR
Oh, did I forget to mention anthropogenic global warming? I will note that Biden is propping up a vast military apparatus — the Pentagon is the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet.
Worth reiterating from @77
Is Biden supposed to be an improvement on the environment? I don’t see it. He is just as responsible as his predecessors and corporate handlers — perhaps moreso as he oversees the buildup of NATO, military encirclement of China, and Israel’s ongoing genocide — for dooming people in my generation and younger to a 10,000-year nightmare planet that may just extinguish humanity. And I’m supposed to vote for that? Fuck ’em.
Democracy isn’t dead just yet, despite Democrats trying their best to kill it. It’s a long shot, but I’ll keep on voting for third-party candidates who oppose all our interminable military conflicts.
@76 LykeX
Having disaffiliated with the Democrats years ago, I may as well help build a third party I actually respect, and which doesn’t try to eternally demobilize and frustrate voters with my ideology.
Isreal is the one in the process of genocide. That political insult fails for moving the attention from the people killing and relocating Palestinians via bombing and other violence.
It’s an observation of fact, Brony. Israel is doing a genocide and Genocide Joe is providing active military assistance, weapons, funding, and diplomatic cover at the U.N., without which Israel would not be able to continue said genocide.
No, it’s still Isreal. This seems similar to Trump complaining of “witch hunts”.
It amuses me when call figurative political language factual. Sputter.
I know, functional enabler of genocide Joe is long.
Foolish troll
My goodness you are stupid. That’s how donpoorleone got elected in 2016. Great job asshats!!
Gotta love how in troll parallel dimensions Biden somehow created an entire Pentagon and military industrial complex that didn’t exist before 2020.
So, having disaffiliated years ago, what did you spend the intervening years doing? Not dreaming about, but DOING? How have you helped build a third party? How have you worked to make that party a viable option and not simply a self-righteous, hand-washing, waste of time and votes?
You’re frustrated with the current situation? I completely agree! So how do you plan to change it? I’m really not trying to be cute here. I’m asking what your approach is for not just ending up with exactly the same situation four, eight, or twenty years in the future?
beholder:
Wilful blindness is not impressive.
Here, for you: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-trump-election-win-could-add-4bn-tonnes-to-us-emissions-by-2030/
Here’s a news report:
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/18/trump-republican-rivals-climate-crisis)
—
TLDR; as with every single other expected outcome, however bad Biden is, Trump will be worse.
A lot worse.
@81, beholder : .
You are ignoring the reality I noted about Trump and his policies as pointed out to you in my #31.
Ae don’t have the time Climate~wise to allow Trump another term with all the waste of time and betond catastrophic environomental damage damage that will result. GHG emissions – how do you they work huh?
I note you ignored everything I wrote and what I asked you in #75 & #73 above. Can you not dobasic maths? Do you not understadn how the USA’s system works? Can you not see or are you deliberately ignoring that you are effectively voting for the worse genocidal monster in Trump?
@90 StevoR
We don’t have time to waste…but apparently the U.S. military and fossil fuel megacorps under Biden can wreck the climate instead and you’re fine with that.
Just admit that he’s your guy and you’ll let him get away with anything up to and including genocide. You know what? If you’re so scared of Trump, then try convincing Biden to seize emergency powers and become dictator for life. Problem solved.
“We had to kill democracy to save it…”
@ 91 beholder
Idiot. That’s exactly what StevoR opposes.
@ 77 The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs)
What an insane rant. Refusing to vote against Trump will do nothing whatsoever to save Gaza.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/6/trumps-talk-on-gaza-highlights-stark-choice-for-voters-in-us-election
@91. beholder :
No, I’m not – and they are’nt either. Certainly nowhere near as badly as Trump will do given the chance. Remember the Democratic party basically accepts the science and is at least goin to try some things to fix it. FYI aming other things :
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2020/oct/20/trump-us-dirtier-planet-warmer-75-ways
Yup. A list of 75 things by Alvin Chang, Emily Holden, Oliver Milman and Noa Yachot.
(Think he’s any better on medical or economic or foreign policy or whatever other grounds? Not likely!)
Then in other branches of the US military – perhaps not too surprisingly given what sea level rise means to the US navy we have Admiral – & Chief Oceanographer – David Titley on Satellite Temperature and Climate Models from nearly a decade ago (3.53 mins) & also via Greenman3610 this ‘Energy Efficiency Part 2” clip also features, guess what, the US military (5 mins 25 secs mark – total length 10 mins 7 secs) promoting Renewables. So, yeah, the US military, whilst it has plenty of issues, are NOT counter-productive science-denying Klowns & are actually doing some good things environmental tech~wise. You could even say they were “woke” and Green long before it was cool. (To the regressive’s howling disgust and, maybe, to your surprise huh?)
Why would I admit something that simply isn’t true? I never said that Biden should get away with genocide. FYI, try to remember which country Biden is President of & thus responsible for. He’s already criticised and advised Netanyahu against doing what he’s doing and is pressuring him NOT to invade Rafah. He let a UN ceasefire resolution go thro’ too. Is that enough? Maybe not but its certainly NOT nothing here.
Try also to recall that Netanyahu supported Trump and would prefer Trump as POTUS, as would the far right in Israel, who are aligned much more closely with the Repugs than the Democrats. Trump literally has an Israeli settlement (Ramat Trump or “Trump Heights” – named after him.See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Heights ) Trump moved the USoA’s embassy to Jerusalem too and recognised the Golan Heights as Israeli land not occupied Syrian land but you, somehow, think Trump will be better than Biden here? How exactly? What do you think Trump will do that Biden won’t when it comes to israel-Palestine? (See #37, recall Trump’s kult base here.) You want that literal quoter and admirer of Hitler, Putin, dictators generally and probable Russian asset back in charge of US foreign policy? Seriously dude? Oh and again, Ukraine but then seems you are a tankie aren’t you? Are you cool with Putin genociding Ukraine with Trump’s help and the Repugs efforts to leave Ukrainians without the weapons they need to defend themselves with?
(Meta : Will you actually answer that question? I suspect it will be one of the many you have so far refused to answer.)
For the record, if Biden is found guilty of anything here, sure, impeach and punish him for it. But that’s a whole separate issue versus the question of who should have your vote for POTUS this year and why.
Oh and clearly you didn’t read what I wrote in #71 which I’ll be nice enough to save you the bother of scrolling up for in the probly forlorn hope that you actually read it and have it register this time :
Back to the deconstructing here :
Obvs no – Fuck no! Because unlike you, I want a proper workable US Democracy as noted in #75 where you get to have your third parties and use them to send messages and grow etc.. Just NOT have them fuck up the rest of the planet right now by voting third party this time and thus letting the worst candidate of the two viable ones get in. Fix tyour system firts then vote greesn or whatever 1 and democrats 2 , Repugs 3 and its fine. Its not the end of the world then given, y’know, again what I’ve already typed / cut’n’pasted in #31 esp the Lucy Hamilton essay.
Also you do realise that was pretty much what Trump planned on or after Jan 6th right? You do realise that that’s what the guy you were potentially going to make POTUS de facto supporting here had in mind, use the Capitol coup – and the murder of Pence and who knows how many other Congress reps to stop Biden’s legitimate certification, declare an emergency, declare the election stolen and then, dictatorship – and he nearly did it.too Foiled by that meddling Eugene Goodman among many other brave people and by Pence actually doing his job rather than what Trump wanted as well. No, beholder, i would NOT stoop to your level here.
For the record :
Source : https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-likely-tried-impose-martial-law-jan-6-miles-taylor-2022-6
Seems Trump would’ve used martial law & the military as his enforcers, appointed his own people toreplace the murdered -incl his veep, destroyed or maybe fabricated evidence or both to “prove” the 2020 election was “stolen” including pressuring officials (eg. Raffensperger as happened over phone in reality but this hypothetical time with Trump still in charge with Nat’l emergency powers and military backing) perhaps at literal gunpoint, overturned the election and then stayed POTUS despite losing the election – even with the rigged in Repugs favour EC.
Beholder do you know who Jared Kushner is don’t you & did you miss this previous post here? :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/03/20/the-kushner-plan/
In addition to what I’ve already noted in #95.
@77. The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) : FYI Saw this on SBS World news last night – although SBS haven’t specifically got an online article on it yet. Her name is Amit Soussana :
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/middleeast/hamas-hostage-sexual-assault.html
SBS does have another old article as does the Guardian newspaper online that seems to also contradict your assertion there.
Cont. @77. The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) : “This comments section is hilarious, which is good because there’s not a lot to laugh about in politics these days.”
Right on the second part there, baffled by your first, why are our comments here “hilarious” exactly?
The first part of that sentence contradicts your second – you literally do not seem to know how the word ‘literally’ works. Metaphorically would’ve been a better word choice by you – but still would be factually inaccurate. No one is saying or thinking what you strawperson claim they are.
Remind me again which “side” of politics you are on? Trump’s, so I gather, that right Vicar?
Citations needed. Your source and evidence for that assertion would be ______?
Wrong. Just what the .. level fractally Wrong. No. The party that supports abortion rights, civil rights and isn’t anti-vaxxer, white supremacist outright fascist and trying to destroy USoA Democracy (such as it currently is) is, y’know, very much ethicially distinguishable, dude. If you can’t see the ethical difference between Biden and Trump, well you are seriously willfully ignorant.
Hint :One of them happily condemns nazis and doesn’t think the Jan 6th insurrectionist traitors were “very fine people” that he loves.
Italics original.
Wow. Yet you claim we are the sociopaths here?
Ever thought how many people you are casually condeming to horrific deaths and incalculable suffering and horror here Vicar?
Italcis orig again.
But you think Trump as the alternative is preferable do you? Seems so. Not that any of us “cling” to Biden (see my #31 & 95) but when you have a choice of two – and that is the choice – candidates you’d choose the worse, more destructive, nightmare one that destroys the rest of the world as well as ultimately yourself Vicar.
I also note you failed to address any of the ponts I’ve raised here or answer my questions. Its all just always blame the Democrats and only the Democratic party for everything with you and put no responsibility on the Repugs isn’t it?
How did that work out in 2016 Vicar? Did those throwing their spoiler or non-vote tantrum in that year achieve anything worthwhile by it? Would millions of Amercians be alive now if they hadn’t and HRC been POTUS then? (Forgot covid did you, Vicar?) Would the world be vastly better if Hillary Clinton had been POTUS or Gore won by enough more in 2000? I think its pretty clear it would’ve been.
For the umpteenth time, reform your American political system so 3rd parties aren’t just spoilers and then vote third party and send all the messages you want and I’ll applaud that. It might actually work and change things for the better.
But vote third party or let the Trump voters turn out when the Democratic ones don’t this year when it matters and that is sociopathic and irresponsible and unethical as fuck.
Just one (as it turns out, not so) quick point:
No, Trump will destroy much more than just your country. Trump as president will have repercussion far beyond your self-centered little world. You’re not making some noble sacrifice for the greater good, here. You’re just throwing a tantrum and screwing us all over in the process.
Let me remind you that there’s war in Europe, right now. I volunteer at my local library and we currently have two Ukrainians who come by to get help to learn Danish. These are people who can’t go home because home is currently a war zone. If you have your way, they may never get to go home, because home will be Russia.
If Trump gets his way, NATO may be a thing of the past. With the Baltics on Russia’s hit-list, the EU will, as a matter of survival, be forced into a much more militaristic stance. Forget about climate change. There won’t be money for that sort of thing. It’ll be drones, grenades, and cyber security.
And with all that attention on the East, one might wonder how the Balkans will respond. Without NATO troops to act as a buffer and with Europe stretched thin, who is going to be keeping a lid on things? There have been rumblings lately, especially from the Serbs. They haven’t given up on getting old territory back. They might even invite Russian troops into Europe through the back door.
And that’s just my personal back yard. What happens to Taiwan when Trump wants to impress his dictator-friends? Hell, what happens when Trump wakes up one morning and decides to nuke a hurricane and there’s no one left to tell him no?
What will happen? I don’t know. Is this a worst-case scenario? Perhaps. Do all these things become more likely if Trump is elected? Abso-FUCKING-lutely.
I see we’ve gone from Joe as the proximate connection to genocide to accusing a commentator of being ok with genocide.
I think it is perfectly clear that some commentators are OK with genocide. Trump won’t lift a finger against any genocidal dictator around the world, he won’t even tut-tut them. Anyone who is OK with Trump as a president is OK with the Ukrainian genocide by Russia, the Kurdish genocide by Turkey, the Palestinian genocide by Izrael, and the Uygur genocide by China to name just the most prominent recent and sometimes ongoing/planned ones. Not to mention the LGB and especially T genocide that the GOP is just craving to perform in the USA because like any fascist movement, in lieu of a real enemy, they need to manufacture one.
I have seen what Trump did in his four years of tenure and I have seen what Biden did. Admittedly, my vantage point is from afar in Europe, but if I had a vote, I would vote for Biden because I do not actually think that he is even remotely as evil as Trump or his dictator pals around the world are. I do not think the word evil is actually appropriate to use for him as a person. Misguided, misinformed, bland, old, out-of-touch, and many other adjectives definitively apply, but I do not think he actually considers a vast part of the world population sub-human and enjoys their suffering and pain, whilst Trump most definitively does that. He actually talks about it out loud FFS.
What is actually evil here is the whole of the USA and it takes a lot to turn that colossus around. There is no single person in the world who could manage to do that in a short period of time. On the other hand, destroying something is always easier than building it up. A good-ish president might not do much for good no matter how they try (and never enough to satisfy the holier-than-thou purists) but a bad one can most certainly turn things for worse rather quickly.
One specific example – it will take a lot of time and effort (and persuasion and money) to turn the industrial colossus away from fossil fuels. It takes no effort at all to continue on the current self-destructive course. And when it comes to other issues the situation is similar. What the purists seem not to want to understand is that changing the society for the better takes time and work, but a societal collapse can happen overnight.
I think everyone should watch the recent testimony of Lev Parnas during the farcical congressional impeachment inquiry hearings. Russia is definitely attempting to get Thrumplestiltskin in power. Again…
Here is a small taste of his testimony from Wiki.
Who is Lev Parnas?
I think Lev Parnas should be put on blast, since apparently there are sitting members of Congress who are beholden to Putin, or just so incredibly stupid that they would believe anything a Russian agent feeds them.
I see the usual numpties (beholder and The Vicar) are out cheerleading for Trump again. To be clear, Biden is enabling genocide – he not only could cut off weapons supplies to Israel, he is breaking the law by not doing so: specifically Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which bars aid to countries that restrict access to US humanitarian assistance. Nevertheless, considering climate disruption alone, it is a clear moral duty to keep Trump (and any plausible Republican replacement if he were to die) out of the Presidency: it is clear he, or they, would trash all the (inadequate) measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The only feasible way to do this is to not only vote for Biden, but work for his re-election. But for beholder and The Vicar, their own precious moral purity is more important than the world’s future.
@99. Brony, Social Justice Cenobite : “I see we’ve gone from Joe as the proximate connection to genocide to accusing a commentator of being ok with genocide.”
Do you mean Vicar claiming those who support Biden are doing so? Or me for asking him about his views on what Putin is doing and trying to do to Ukraine? Oh & Vicar saying the USA needs to be destroyed in their #77? Or all the above? Is what Vicar and beholder have said reasonable in your view? Is what we have said in response to it reasonable in your view?
I regularly diagnose dementia, and I agree that Trump is probably demented.
I have to put in that “probably” because to make the diagnosis you have to speak at length with a corroborating historian (usually a child of the patient) to go over the history of the patient’s progressive need for assistance in activities of daily life that can only be attributed to progressive cognitive decline. I usually have to spend at least two hours with the patient and family member to be reasonably sure of the diagnosis, because there are always alternate reasons the patient might display all sorts of behaviors that might be attributed to cognitive decline, and you have to carefully tease apart these alternate reasons from cognitive decline as your explanation. It’s these alternate reasons that make me question the criteria used here.
The wide-based gait and every other observation of physical disability is beside the point. Yes, some dementias are part of a wider syndrome that includes some [physical symptoms as well as cognitive decline, but these are much less common both as symptoms separate disorders that don’t involve dementia, and are very rare as causes of dementia, compared to Alzheimer’s and vascular dementias.
Simplified syntax, vocabulary, and grammar is a very weak indicator of cognitive decline in a person speaking to the general public. In fact, it was a common bit of advice to people who do have to talk to the public that you should assume your listeners have no more than a 4th grade education. That advice is at least 30 years old. God knows what perfectly reasonable assumptions you should make about the best way to address a MAGAt audience in order to be understood.
Much of the behavior cited can be explained by a wider application of the idea that he is consciously appealing to an audience that doesn’t bother to bring more than their reptile brains to political discourse. Rhetorically he’s a bully and makes no end of inappropriate attacks on the weak and helpless, but why assume that he’s trying to be appropriate? He’s found his schtick, and that schtick involves being Mr. Id, the surrogate reptile brain for a following. So, are tens of millions of us, all those who voted for this person, and say they will vote for him again, also demented?
All sorts of behaviors of his, from that ride down the escalator on, had me concerned that he was probably demented, but the decisive factor, what first made me reasonably certain that he suffers from a cognitive decline, was his interview with Lester Holt where he gave away his alibi over the Comey firing. In that case, and the phone call with Zelensky later, I can find no at all reasonable reason for the irrationality of what he said to be the craziness of the fox, things he said to appeal to an audience. He simply doesn’t understand the really simple concept of conflict of interest, though it was obvious in both those case that he had been carefully coached on that subject. No doubt, like Nixon, he doesn’t think that conflict of interest should limit his actions, but Nixon was able to understand the concept well enough to fake a respect for it, while Trump just seems to not understand the concept.
With an actual patient of mine I never have to hang the diagnosis on just one thing, which is why I won’t go so far as to say that Trump is clearly demented. But to believe he’s not, you would have to come up with some plausible reason that he volunteered that his alibi for the Comey firing was fake, and for asking Zelensky to produce the True Server of the Crowdstrike mythos. I’m clearly not as imaginative as these people, so perhaps there is some explanation based on some dog-whistle to the MAGAts in frequencies beyond my limited powers of perception, which go no further than mere sense and reason can take me..
Guess Vicar, beholder & Brony aren’t going toanswer my questions here. Sigh.
So you’re stupid, ignorant, and dishonest … these aren’t virtues but you seem proud of it.
You’re a fucking moron. Even if we thought that was the morally correct path, we could not possibly succeed, so it doesn’t solve any problem, you imbecile.