I’m just finishing the Crippled God now! Definitely a difficult series but so infinitely rewarding (and heart breaking.)

I agree with this so hard.

But it’s okay to admit we’re not living in poop houses anymore, I promise it won’t cause sudden mass contentment with our lives under modern regimes.

In fact, I feel refusal to admit this or similar actually **hurts **the cause. If we can’t admit to basic reality, why should anyone trust us about anything? If someone tells me that trump is bad because he turned them into a newt, well I’m going start to doubt the other cases they’re bringing forward against trump (unless that someone still looks very newt-y.)

Being unable to admit or ignorant of reality doesn’t make our case any more compelling, except to the similarly ignorant or converted.

But I heard life was better as a medieval peasant! /s

(I know kids don’t know a lot but damn that take bothers the hell out of me.

The American stock market is hugely weighted by the top 5 or so companies, all of whom if I remember have jumped hugely in value based on ai (nvidia, microsoft, amazon, apple, meta) so if it turns out/investors decide there isn’t a way to make ai profitable, those valuations tumble as does the American stock market and likely the world’s.

That experience hits too close to home.

I think because we choose the topics we engage with on social media, they’re usually ones we’re passionate about.

But the size of the online community means most folks are anonymous. So, unlike your friends or even a group of strangers, there’s a much lower consequence for jerkiness, rudeness etc in response to views which in your eyes may range from insane to evil.

I didn’t go to a job because I wanted to watch trailer park boys. Don’t know how unique that is though, it’s a pretty good show.

t’ll help if you didn’t reduce someone’s viewpoints as being childish or that they know only the basics

You say that but then go on to equate what’s happened in the West Bank with what’s happened in Gaza, which is downright insane. It’s like saying “I had a paper cut, not much different from being the victim in a Saw movie.” Like, you think it’s a coincidence they announced plans to annex just hours after the election? ffs

Admittedly, I do love the silliness of “Harris just had to have a harder stance.” Trying to picture how she’d campaign like that has kept me giggling for awhile. “So, do you oppose the current administration of which you are a part?” “No, I just… We need to do things differently.” “Are you making Biden a lame duck president in August? What other policies of his do you think are wrong? Do you think Biden doesn’t value Palestinians? Why do you think Biden won’t do this? If you disagree with your administration, why did you wait until you were a candidate to take a stand? Should foreign leaders just deal with you directly instead of bothering with Biden these days?” "Damnit guys, can we please just talk about Rampart? "

Goodness. I get that you want to care etc but you’re digging yourself into stranger and sillier positions. As you grow up, you’ll find it’s not just useful to admit you weren’t entirely correct, it’s actually a really mature response which people respect that. Doubling down on sillier and sillier claims just makes you and your side look foolish.

Check local community colleges? My province has a few that offer pretty decent coding courses.

I’ve never met/zoomed/chatted with a teacher in real time but you can usually ask questions in lecture or whatnot.

Maybe instead of conflating authoritarianism and anti immigration policies, we could try winning elections?

This 7 month old article sounds more conspiracy theorist than actual reporting.

Take an independent voter in America. In 2016, almost all Left media screamed that trump was going to be a fascist. And despite the craziness on Jan 6, he lost in free and fair elections. So when the same damn arguments, no matter how reasonable, were trotted out 8 years later, after people had seen trump not turn to an authoritarian regime, how on Earth did we expect to win over those who were unsure?

Jesus, call Polievre lots of things but seriously, a threat to democracy? Damnit, I vote Left and this just makes me realize the Tyee isn’t a particularly good or vetted news source. (Admittedly, what did I expect, you do get what you pay for.)

That’s one of the reasons I cut the cord.

And unsubscribed from Netflix/Prime when they started asking for more money for ads.

And freak out whenever the weird hacky fix from the depths of Lemmy that kills youtube ads stops working for a day.

Ads are the goddamn worse, Carpenter had them dead to rights in They Live.

Yeah, mine’s pretty old and sick but I’m really hoping she makes it through to the summer in large part so she can doze in the warm with the sun on her face at least a few more times before her time’s up. (Well, that and I’m selfish and I’ll miss the hell out of her.)

That’s the thing I find most depressing about a trump presidency, there will be a time when the rational Left looks back on it as “when things weren’t so bad.”

Like, when I was a kid I, and many others, never imagined there could be a president dumber than Bush…

I suppose I could’ve just checked wikipedia, I was sort of right but also sort of wrong:

Development Tom Clancy met Larry Bond in 1982. The two discussed Convoy-84, a wargame Bond had been working on at the time that featured a new Battle of the North Atlantic. The idea became the basis for Red Storm Rising. “We plotted out the book together, then, while I researched the military issues, Tom wrote the book,” Bond said.[5] “I’m listed as co-author, but I wrote like 1 percent of the book,” Bond stated in a 2013 interview.[6] For research on the Politburo scenes, Clancy and Bond interviewed Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko.[7]

Clancy had purchased Bond’s wargame Harpoon as a primary source for his future novel The Hunt for Red October (1984).[8] Clancy and Bond used the board game’s second edition miniature rules to test key battle sequences, notably the Soviet operation to seize Iceland and the attack on the carrier battle group in the “Dance of the Vampires” chapter.

Dance of the Vampires This refers to the chapter where the Soviets lure a NATO carrier group into a trap and almost manages to wipe it out.[9]

The game sessions typically involved several players on each side (Clancy among them) acting in various roles.[10] with Bond refereeing. The games did not influence the outcome - the chapter’s ending was already decided - but they gave Clancy and Bond a “better understanding of what factors drove each side’s thinking”.[11][12]

This attention to detail made Vice consider Red Storm Rising a “great example of fictional military history.”[9]

The collected and annotated notes on the three Dance of the Vampires scenario playthroughs would later be published by Bond.[11][13]

I think it was mostly meant as military nerd porn.

Like, the guys who blow up the refinery are only important in asmuch as they create the need for a conflict with the West. Some oppressed group pulls off something wild but doesn’t have the men/material to do anything major afterwards (which is how a lot of terrorism goes.)

I’m pretty sure I remember reading that Clancy and a buddy essentially wargamed the conflict and wrote out the results.

But there’s a lot I know as well.

See, I think this is the issue. You’ve shared some of the very basics. Most explainer articles should (and do) include this info. And I think you’re confusing knowing a handful of basics with something approaching authority. Admittedly, I imagine you have given more context than most Tiktoks, so yay?

Here are a few other basics but that add context and illuminate the difference between Harris and trump:

About half of Palestinians live in the West Bank, which has basically been off limits for Israeli military incursions, despite the far right. In large part because of American red lines, Israel has mostly left the West Bank alone in this conflict.

The United State’s policy on Israel/Palestine has been to advocate for a 2 state solution (which the PLO has walked away from, repeatedly.) Donald already shred any pretense of supporting a 2 state solution when he recognized Jerusalem as capital of Israel. For the loudest and most loyal part of his base, the evangelicals, Israel must own all of its own territory in order to bring about the End Times. (yay.) So, there’s a definite possibility that trump actively encourages Israel to ramp up their move to a 1 apartheidish state and West Bank becomes Gaza without the restraint.

And yes, you might complain that Gaza is unrestrained but that’s pretty silly. Some 40k Palestinians have died, which is too many but at that rate, the war could go on for another half century and more than half the Palestinians would be around. (And of course, if you note that most of the casualties were in the first 4 months after Hamas murdered and/or raped more than a thousand civilians, and “only” ~ 10K have died since Februaryish, well, you should realize that’s a deaccelerating conflict.) Unfortunately, trump means that hard right/Bibi have a good chance of escalating things right back up. (The Biden administration has demanded more aid etc in exchange for continued support, something that’s highly unexpected from a trump administration.)

Meanwhile, somewhere between 2-3 million Palestinians, who don’t have the first world luxury to ignorantly declare things are the going to be the same, know how much worse things are about to get.

And of course on the American side, the notion that Harris would be able to override Biden while she’s VP is lunacy. Pray tell, when is the last time you saw a VP undermine their boss like that? (The closest I can think of was when Biden let slip that the administration was moving to codify gay marriage, but that’s not even close to the same ballpark.) Arguing for a radically different path while in office but without any authority is similarly nonsensical. (If the Harris administration would be different, that incentives Israel to go much harder now while they can and puts Biden into a no win scenario.)

Would I have liked the Democrats to do more? Absolutely. But to say that because Palestinians in Gaza are dying those in the West Bank should too suggests you are too ignorant to know the difference between Gaza and West Bank or too racist to care.

Finally, I’ll remind you that the original question was what can America do to prevent the situation from worsening. Electing Harris over trump is a no brainer move to prevent things from getting as bad as they can under trump. Then electing progressive Dems in the primaries so they can move Harris on this. With trump in power, the Democratic primaries and midterms are relatively meaningless and unlikely to help the Palestinians.

In trump’s economy, maybe?

The older you get, the more you’ll realize it’s okay and even a good idea to just say “I don’t really know about this.”

To say that Harris and trump mean the same thing for the Palestinians is outright nonsensical. Some of the Israeli ministers (notably Smotrich) have been very explicit about the fact that trump’s win, among other things, makes annexation of the West Bank much more likely.

There’s a lot of background that you kind of really have to be in the weeds to catch but if you’ve been reading Foreign Policy and others, you’d know that while the Biden administration ought to have done more, there were still some red lines (annexation, hitting Iranian oil/nuclear facilities etc.) With trump in charge, it’s unclear which if any red lines still exist.

It’s a humanitarian crisis but to claim that Harris and trump mean the same thing is as downright silly as you can get. Saying things that are patenly nonsensical makes you look pretty danged silly.

Manufacturing consent is one of my favourites!

It’s not even privilege, just wildly ignorant or childish to see something horrible and decide “yup, can’t get worse than that!”

If you literally don’t understand that trump and Harris will have very different red lines, you don’t know enough to talk about this.