“Accused” by whom?

The British, by the look of it

You laugh, but I still have no idea what I’m going to do in November.

I’m in Texas, so it doesn’t really matter. But its not something I enjoy thinking about.

Kelvin Bares the Cross

Re: Righteous Gemstones

MR PRESIDENT GET DOWN!

Surely there’s one better young person in the USA ?

None of them ran. Biden’s admin and his fund raising base held enormous sway over the party at-large. As soon as he corralled the support of this tiny monied elite, everyone else had to either get in line or get marked as party pariahs and ousted for their disloyalty.

The pastiche of democracy is predicated on a primary system that can produce and sustain rival candidates. But when leadership in the party are terrified of “Russian bots” and “Leftist Antifa Agitators” undermining the general election, they circle the wagons around their incumbents and bow down to their mega-donors out of cowardice.

No rival candidates means no real primary means no one actually challenges Biden on his merits.

We should have gotten a second season at least.

Fox Media was run by sadists

I’m going to take a bold position and say they were all good consoles. It was a beautiful time for video games.

My man has some of the best health care our government can buy, plus a legion of sponsors ready to prop him up indefinitely.

Little reason to believe he’s going anywhere, at least not before the next GOP president can replace him with an equally pilled far right judge.

It’s worse if you expect the first guy to be a strong contender against the second guy

BIDEN: Fentanyl and the byproducts of fentanyl went down for a while. And I wanted to make sure we use the machinery that can detect fentanyl, these big machines that roll over everything that comes across the border, and it costs a lot of money. That was part of this deal we put together, this bipartisan deal.

More fentanyl machines, were able to detect drugs, more numbers of agents, more numbers of all the people at the border. And when we had that deal done, he went – he called his Republican colleagues said don’t do it. It’s going to hurt me politically.

He never argued it’s not a good bill. It’s a really good bill. We need those machines. We need those machines. And we’re coming down very hard in every country in Asia in terms of precursors for fentanyl. And Mexico is working with us to make sure they don’t have the technology to be able to put it together. That’s what we have to do. We need those machines.

The fanaticism and fatalism produce some interesting parallels

Pick less evil each time!

Part of the problem is that people are sold on these guys as “Less Evil” every time. Clinton was the less-evil replacement for Bush. Bush Jr was the less-evil replacement for Clinton. Obama for Bush. Trump for Obama/Hillary. Biden for Trump. Maybe now Trump for Biden.

Evil is necessarily subjective, and a great deal of what we see as “evil” varies starkly based on where we’re getting our news and our values. What do you tell to the people who are doggedly convinced a mob of hispanic/arabic/chinese fentanyl fueled rape gangs are charging across the border to steal American children and murder them for their adrenochrome? What do you say to the folks doggedly convinced that the wrong President will bring about a thermo-nuclear holocaust or a dozen new 9/11s? How do you reason with a person who believes Plan B is no different than strangling a baby to death with your own two hands?

So much of the conversation about “Lesser Evil” is justifying a new and more brutal police state as a defensive measure against some horrifying phantom menace - be it J6 Groypers coming to lynch everyone to the left of Mitt Romney or Chinese TikTok dancers tricking American teenagers into perpetuating a Uyghur genocide.

When you’ve got Israeli Genocide versus Palestinian Islamic Jihad as your baseline for debate, there’s an endless capacity for evil even in the “Lesser” branch.

He missed a slam dunk when he pivoted from abortion to immigration, there was no logical reason to do that.

The Republican strategy has been to focus on immigration as the root of all economic evil. And since Biden’s economic gains have been heavily overstated, he’s forced right back into the old “We have to force foreigners out in order to keep our wealth in” fascist politics.

We need an open convention

Idk who this “We” is supposed to be. Are you speaking as a well-positioned party superdelegate, member of the DNC leadership committee, or mega-donor? Or are you some internet armchair asshole watching this trainwreck from the nosebleed seats?

Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living

I’ve seen a number of content creators argue otherwise. From the “Hello from the Magic Tavern” sketch comedy group to the “Scenes from the Multiverse” Cartoonist to the various musicians cranking out indie tunes on Bandcamp, the refrain I consistently here is that direct patronage offers significantly better returns than ad-supported payments on bigger media platforms.

Indie creators generally have an easier time of securing monthly subscriptions because they’re more boutique and have closer connections to the audience. And you don’t need an enormous audience to bring in a reliable income. While YouTubers need to get into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to see any kind of productive ROI, Patreon artists can justify the expense of their work on an audience in the hundreds. They can go entirely indie with an audience in the thousands.

Most creators can’t afford to go fully indie, but the margins are so much better relative to the audience size with direct payments. Even just $2/viewer/episode pays vastly more than what a streaming service offers.

When you attack someone stronger than you, it usually does not end well.

Explaining this to the Israeli shipping companies currently bottlenecked in the Suez by Houthi rebels.

if my children or wife had been taken hostage

The first thing I’d do is find a dozen people of the same ethnicity as the hostage taker and kill them. Then I’d send in a strike team to grab anyone I believed was affiliated with the hostage taker - coworkers, family members, social media contacts - and imprison them indefinitely. Finally, I’d bulldoze someone’s house. Doesn’t really matter whose. Just to show people I mean business.

The difference between my opinion and yours is that you consider it incidental murder, while I consider it a war

I’m reminded of this old Thomas Friedman quote.

It’s important to stop for a moment here and take note of the fact that Friedman’s idea wasn’t that we specifically needed to attack Iraq. Friedman didn’t even bother to claim to Charlie Rose that there was, for example, a link between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Instead, he said that the problem is that “they” needed to see that Americans didn’t care so much about our “stock options and Hummers” that we were unwilling to make sacrifices.

What was the “they,” exactly? Muslim extremists? Muslims in general? The Middle East as a region? Friedman casts a very wide net:

“What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house—from Basra to Baghdad—and basically saying:

“Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?: You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this fantasy—we’re just gonna let it grow? Well, suck. On. This. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We coulda hit Saudi Arabia… We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”

How many people are they allowed to kill in retaliation for Oct 7th? Zero? 1:1? 10:1?

Per the Dahiya Doctrine the general rule is 30:1. If a single Israel is injured or killed, the state has the authority to kill up to 30 Palestinians.

Commentators for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Mondoweiss have noted that the attacks of the Israeli Defense Forces on the civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip during the 2023 Hamas-Israel war may constitute an extension of the doctrine. Haaretz reported that IDF had dropped “all restraint” in its war: killed civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure at an unprecedented rate.

Writing in The Guardian, Paul Rogers of Bradford University argues that Israel’s goal in the 2023 war is to “corral the Palestinians into a small zone in the southwest of Gaza where they can be more easily controlled,” and that the long-term goal is to make clear that Israel “will not stand for any opposition.”

We just need to vote for the lesser of the two evils every time to get rid of them.

When asked if he supports some restrictions on abortion, Biden said he “supports Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters. The first time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between a doctor and an extreme situation. A third time is between the doctor, I mean, between the women and the state.”

This seems to be the only criteria anyone can evaluate. But if that’s the case, why bother removing Biden? Let the man drool his way into a second term. Its all the same, so long as he isn’t Trump.