With President Joe Biden out of the race, Democrats have started questioning the mental fitness of Trump, who would be the oldest president in history if he wins in November.
If the DNC had allowed a primary, this would have been the news cycle for the last 3 months. The instinct to micromanage everything and allow no real democracy because voters can't be trusted A) led to them ordaining Biden, the worst monster to occupy the White House since Andrew "Sharpknife" Jackson. And B) led to questions about his mental acuity eclipsing Trump's overt decline, leading to a second Trump term, the very thing the DNC said we needed to short circuit democracy to avoid. Mission Accomplished, DNC! Heckuvajob, demmy!
I remember telling my friends that if they didn't want it to be biden vote in the primary. They didn't see the point. There were a lot of people who pretended the primary didn't exist during it though. Poor Dean what's his face. No one remembers he existed. I only remember half his name
He founded Talenti. And he could have brought the deliciousness and transparency of his ice cream to America... But seriously, he only ran because he is independently wealthy and was sick of being in congress. An AOC (not to lionize that class traitor) who in theory needs their paycheck in congress would NEVER have stepped out of line because the DNC doesn't really allow primaries. Haven't my whole life (now they at least in theory don't blacklist companies that work with primary challengers, although I don't trust a party that would have that policy to begin with to enact that reform).
You may have been born within the last 4 years, but the DNC basically cancelled the primary when it looked like Bernie was winning and Obama forced all non-Biden neolib shills out of the race because we must defeat Trump and Bernie CANNOT defeat Trump (despite what polling showed,as the DNC's primary liability is losing it's pre-Trump working class base) and then they cancelled the primary in 2024 BECAUSE they knew Biden wasn't even 2020-level senile
though i’m not an american so idk all your 40 whatever it is presidents but all the ones i recognise there are republicans and im pretty sure that if the ones there are real old then well… it’s a totally different party to what it was? it’s not a team - its politics after all; things change
I mean his original comment didn’t specify democrat, and in his second comment, I didn’t think it was a worthwhile stipulation. Also, Nixon and Reagan still loom somewhat large over the modern Republican Party, and GWB and the wunderraper are both very recent republican presidents
Edit: and I mean where he said the worst monster to occupy the White House, that seems to imply all former residents, no? Not just democrats
I specified genocide, also, like W killed a million Iraqis, but not for love of brown person blood and to replace them with the one subgroup of whites whose supremacy we still accept, and I maintain, Bibi will beat 1 mil. Probably in Gaza alone.
Yes, the ideology of the parties is always in flux and particularly now. Quick primer -- originally you had the Democratic-Republican party and the Federalists, but the Federalists wanted the British to reconquer us in 1812, so they were banned and rebranded as the Whigs (which was what anti-royalists were called during the revolution to help unbrand them as traitors to Britain) meanwhile the Democratic-Republicans fell apart and Andrew Jackson created The Democracy! (Exclamation mark part of the proper name ala Yahoo!) Which held that all white men, even if they don't currently own land should have the vote, and also that we should Israel-style kill as many of the native inhabitants in as horrible ways as we can. A generation later the Whigs fell apart via Buchanan being Biden-level awful, so the Federalist traitors of 1812 rebranded yet again to The Republican Party, which ironically calls itself the "Grand Old Party" despite being younger than The Democracy! Then there was the Civil War and you probably know most of the rest, but I think the modern GOP is becoming like the democrats of the 70's, a mix of the religious and workers, and the DNC is becoming like the GOP of the Nixon era, professional autocrats and small business tyrants and social climbing college educateds, but it's always in flux, which would make more parties clutch, but the duopoly cooperates to prevent that, and always have.
I specified democrat on purpose, but still...
While Buchanan was bad, I'm unaware of specific genocide stuff, but it is just before the crazy northern Midwest wars with the native Americans you don't learn about where I'm from so I guess I defer if you're a Minnesotan but I don't know. There's obviously the race stuff, but I'm unaware of whites bombing black city blocks before the Tulsa Massacre
Nixon with the Khmer Rouge will definitely challenge Biden's net genocide numbers, but I have faith Bibi will get there.
Reagan -- while beheading people and stapling their hands onto the heads at a dinner table as a family is certainly macabre, I think in terms of overall numbers and population-wide decimation it's a lower scale. Fucked up though, and anyone surviving who did that should hang at The Hague (is Ollie North still alive?)
W -- he killed a million Iraqis. I have faith Bibi can do better with Biden's help, but he and Cheney and Alberto Gonzales are now dems, so... Not a good look
Hoover -- starved a great many by just capitalist ideology, but that's not really genocide...
Genocide Joe has signed onto and egged on behind the scenes while lying to us the genocide of all non-Jews in the middle east (at least). They just struck another christian community in northern Lebanon. You've probably never been to Lebanon, I have, there are dudes with AK-47's behind sandbags at each ethnic enclave's border, there's no way Hezbollah was among christian Maronites, the Israelis (and Biden and Blinken and McGurk) are just extracting non-jewish blood for lebensraum.
We all do. The worst men our society has ever produced will come to power yet again no matter who wins while we burn children in their hospital beds and there's effectively NO real resistance, and sheep like you LIKE this because they've broken you like an Indian elephant
starved a great many by just capitalist ideology, but that’s not really genocide…
Genocide doesn't require bloodthirst, it does just fine with sacrifice whole populations for some other goal or accepting those deaths as "collateral". The UN definition supports this.
I'd argue the Hooverian starvation for capitalism is substantively different in racial context than Queen Victoria starving 70 million Africans and Indians for capitalism, AFAIK there was no "and now we'll starve out the negro menace" but I am not a scholar of american history or this era so I am open to being wrong. Biden, Blinken, and McGurk are all currently egging on the Israeli ethno state in starving out and bombing the soulless non-jew monkeys who have no souls, including Christians like former GOP congressman Justin Amash's family and random Lebanese Maronites, Armenians, etc
I am obliged to note that genocide does not need to be racial (it can target religion, sexuality, nationality, etc.), but your point stands because none of those apply either. I'll just mark it in the Black Book of Capitalism and be content with that.
Think the little red book was a bad strategy for its time because it's essentially a collection of quotations, so it wasn't good for systematic understanding of Mao's thought. In the modern day the internet at least makes it somewhat better because the LRB has citations, so you can just look them up and see the context for the statement.
I'm kind of curious how the LRB came about, since it feels pretty condescending, but Mao was perhaps the most optimistic political leader I've ever heard of in terms of just giving the people a small bit of advice or a revised law and letting them handle the rest (this sometimes went extremely poorly, of course).
Well here's the funny thing with neolibs, when I say she should choose a different policy, she can't because she's not president even though she's the candidate... Also, a political party is one brand, you can't pretend it's not, and Biden has created a brand association of DNC==horrifying image of war crime he egged on
The entire US government is the image of war crimes they egged on, regardless of party. Don't act like you're not immediately a war criminal by becoming president. Trump is a war criminal. So is Biden, and Obama, and every president before then with precious few exceptions.
I'd argue Trump is actually the least war-crimey of those listed. Obama literally murdered two US citizens by drone, and Biden's trying to rehab Nixon's image by funding a larger genocide than Cambodia.
I volunteered for Clinton in '92 for universal healthcare and gay rights and got the end of the social safety net and don't ask don't tell probably before you were born, you have bought into the Kang v Kodos system and don't even realize (or get that reference because you were 8 in 1996)
It's just that while there is a genocide going on in Gaza.
There's a genocide roughly 10x as large going on in Ukraine, and that one is threatening to spill out in ww3, and nobody from Ukraine started it.
Russia is trying to make as much trouble in the world as it can to distract from Ukraine, and I'm willing to let Gaza keep going as it has for a while.
Yes, I'm a genocide-whatever-er, and I don't care, because the other genocide is so much worse.
But as the ml-boys say: "If Gaza wants it to end, they just have to surrender to Israel", like they say Ukraine should.
There’s a genocide roughly 10x as large going on in Ukraine
Civilian deaths in Ukraine over the last ~3.5 years are still smaller than the substantially underestimated civilian death toll in Gaza after 1 year (which came from a very stringent set of definitions that basically can't be executed on anymore because of Israel bombing the hospitals).
There's no way you could get to this conclusion except some hysterical idea about Putin wanting to put all the Ukrainians in camps as though that's what he did with Crimea.
What are you doing with cutesy sarcasm and cherrypicked headlines? Just look at the civilian death tolls. The immediately-presented numbers are 36k over 3.5 years to 42k over 1 year, and that's again with massive under-reporting in the latter case.
Aside, again, from the fact that Gaza is being undercounted severely due to strict criteria for marking a civilian death combined with most of the hospitals in Gaza being blown up, yes! the rate of killing matters a great deal to understanding what is going on unless you are taking the hysterical view that Putin is going to kill every Ukrainian and is just dragging his feet a little.
This is wrong on almost every level. It wasn't a genocide (some people call it that, but the mainstream liberal historical consensus is that it was collectivization being botched along with some bad crop conditions), it has very little to do with anything happening in the war, and the Russian Federation was brought into existence in order to overthrow the communists. The logical end point of Putin's weird revanchist rhetoric is closer to wanting to undo the separation of nations in the former Russian Empire that began under Lenin and bring things back to the Tsarist model that preceded it. That's what he means when he says that he wants to show Ukraine what "decommunization" entails, since the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, while it was still under a central authority, had greater autonomy than the region had under the Tsar and he is making the threat that he will take that away.
God, I hate how bad education is that this even needs to be explained. Imperial Russia had been suffering from famines on a cyclical basis for centuries and, contrary to what some people say, neither Lenin nor Stalin were magicians who could just bend reality in the USSR, though many -- including some "Stalinist" Marxists -- argue that Stalin basically tried to for left-deviationist reasons when material conditions didn't actually support collectivising the way he wanted the state to, and that (along with drought and blight) caused the famine. Important to understanding this, however, is that the only time there would ever be a famine in the USSR after that was in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion as a direct result thereof. The next "famine" in Russia would be around 50 years later with the establishment of the Russian Federation, where the gutting of just about every public program and industry caused a huge excess death event over a period of a couple years.
The idea of it being a genocide -- aside from being a lie popularized by Goebbels that has no support in the Soviet archives -- is even more ridiculous for the fact that the famine ended and nothing ever happened to the Ukrainians on fractionally that scale except for the Nazis! But of course the Ukrainian Nazis love saying the Russians wanted all Ukrainians dead, because it gave them cover for perpetrating the Holocaust (see "double genocide theory").
To add one last point on "this doesn't work as a genocide," a plurality of the victims were Ukrainian nationals, but it was spread out over multiple nations and the part of Ukraine the famine impacted was overwhelmingly in the east. You know, the part that's Russian in huge disproportion. Of course, one of the other countries impacted, with I think 1.5 million dead or something like that, was Russia! It would be like trying to wipe out a population by detonating an atom bomb where a quarter of the blast is on your side of the border, then just not doing anything when most of the population you targeted survived! It only makes sense if you're assuming the Russians were such miserable morons that the dumbest Banderite bandit is incomparably more refined.
Oh no, how evil, they bombed a school and hospital…
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but um...Yeah, that is evil that they bombed a school and hospital. It is also evil on what is happening in Ukraine. Both can be true.
However, the USA has a a larger influence to put a stop on only one of them, and that is by, at the very least, dramatically reducing the arms being sent to Israel. If Israel knew they would not get resupplied with weapons and ammo so easily then it would make them think twice about using what they already have.
You can't compare troop deaths to civilian deaths. Gaza is a bigger deal and has no offramp. Ukraine should have just given Crimea and Donbas water access to Russia for peace to begin with. Also, this betrays you only care about white deaths, which is preeeeettty racist.
Unlike Gaza, Ukraine could surrender. Putin wants the naval bases in Crimea and water from the Donbas for that. Netanyahu wants to eradicate or subjugate all non-jewish races like Hitler in a yarmulke. There IS no surrender, they killed the leader of Hezbollah (and everyone within three blocks) BECAUSE he was acquiescing to a ceasefire Netanyahu can't have and stay out of jail