Mind sharing what you mean, “or whatever?” Are you arguing using facts that came to you in a dream?

I guess it was just no term limits? Still, he’s got control of all the levers of power and without term limits he can continue to consolidate power over time, gathering favors, loyalty, etc. There’s a reason people like term limits and Mexico fought a couple wars over the idea.

In what way?

Power goes from father to son. They have elections but the person in power always wins like 100% of us vote, and I don’t even think they have alternative candidates. Someone else above had a link that showed they have a person and you just vote “yes or no” for that person, which isn’t very democratic if you don’t know the alternative.

Do you have evidence that there were not popularly elected bodies making all of the decisions, and that leaders of AES states were never contested successfully?

I don’t, but if you have proof that those things have happened before, I’d be curious to see them.

What about Stalin who purged rivals and sent out hit men with ice picks to take out his critics? Or Xi Jinping who’s been made President for life or whatever recently? Or Fidel Castro who basically led the country from the revolution until he was too old to run it? The DPRK which looks like a monarchy in all but name? No one says dictators run whole countries literally by themselves but they do dictatorial things to make sure people only loyal to them can have power, their word is law without going through other checks or balances by the people, like some popularly elected body or something.

I will admit though that after Stalin, the USSR changed out rulers pretty regularly so that doesn’t seem like a dictatorship to me. Same with Cuba now after Castro. Now people just say it because those countries allow only one party I guess.

It’s tough because I don’t actually want all the redditors here because of the low effort pun comment chains, constant bot comments, pervasive echo chambers and pop culture drivel. But on the other hand, I do miss the discussion in some of the more niche subreddits here.

The dichotomy of man.

Tbh, I’m embarrassed to say that I thought that people were run over by tanks until I saw someone arguing it on Lemmy and I went to look up accounts by Western reporters there at the time, including the guy who took the tank man picture. So even if the “tankie” instances are right on this subject, they probably shouldn’t ban people, but should disseminate correct information instead.

Thanks, I dislike that, too. The difference between this genocide and others, is that the US is directly involved in this one. Palestinian children are being killed by our bombs, dropped by equipment based on our technology, from deals we’ve given them, and ordered by politicians we are supporting. If the US wasn’t involved, I wouldn’t care as much. But they are. Blinken runs interference for them, defending Israel at every opportunity. We block resolutions against them in the UN. The press uses loaded language with Hamas and the passive voice with Israel caused tragedies and massacres. We promise retribution against the ICC if they prosecute Netanyahu (if you ever need proof we’re the baddies, look at that. Threatening vengeance against international court when they are trying to punish a genocide). Biden has gone around Congress to give stuff to Israel multiple times. They avoid applying any pressure to Israel to let in aid, instead using the vastly inefficient and more expensive failure of a pier. He keeps saying it’s not a genocide despite a bunch of other countries saying it is. They block news of bad things Israel does and actively lie about it. People in his administration have left over these things. I agree with you that the US should be less involved and not be the World Police. But you seem to think this means I want us to go in. If we were not involved, that would be a VAST improvement over the status of quo, of being involved in purely bad ways. At least if we weren’t involved, I wouldn’t feel responsible as an American in a democracy to use my vote to affect change in some way, to do good, agonizing over whether to vote for a “Hitler” because his holocaust is abroad and he’s got better domestic policies. I hate the DNC for putting those of us with a conscience in this position.

Now, this doesn’t mean I think people should vote for Trump. Maybe I should’ve emphasized that more. He’s obviously worse. But he’s not causing this right now, Biden is. So he’s a bad President. I can acknowledge he’s better than Trump on this and all other issues, and still criticize him for that.

I agree some explanation would be nice at least.

Any President who encourages a genocide is by definition a bad President I’m sorry to say. The ethnic cleansing campaign is already almost complete, all on his watch with his defending Israel and giving them weapons and cover in the UN and in public. Hell, he even lied about the reason on the debate (the one thing he lied about and Trump told the truth about lol). People should still feel free to vote for him, especially if you live in a swing state, but we shouldn’t minimize that millions of Gazans are currently refugees. I hope he fucking shapes up on this issue by November. I don’t want him to take all these votes for him as an endorsement of his pro genocide policies.

Ohio used to be a swing state, too, right? Not sure of it still is or if it isn’t, how that turned around. But maybe they should be in the list?

Thanks!

The problem is even when they have control they can barely do anything because of dumb rules like the filibuster, or blue dog senators.

Biden also doesn’t act very left. He’s passed a couple good pieces of legislation, but he doesn’t support popular movements like labor strikes and prefers to make backroom deals (which residues their power for the future organizing), and he’s very staunchly pro genocide for some reason, and been as hard on the border as Trump. He’s just not as fascist as Trump but don’t let the skewed Overton Window deceive you. He’s a centrist moderate Democrat, like an Obama who learned to stop trying to reason with Republicans earlier and picked a few really good people for some cabinet positions (not Blinken, but like for the Secretary of the Interior BLM or FTC) and many meh people for others.

Left voters showed up to vote for him and then he basically abandoned the coalition he formed. He had a super majority and did like one, watered down Republican healthcare policy. He should’ve kept up the organizations and email lists he utilized to get into office to keep up the pressure on Congress in midterm elections, but that basically stopped as soon as he became President. He’s not unusual in that regard, every President except for Trump, does this. But it’s especially annoying for Obama because he had the closest to a broad coalition in recent history and it got him a super majority.

Bernie is basically the only Presidential candidate who has shown any awareness of how bottom up coalitions are used, not just to get one into office, but to continue to pressure with the power of the people. That’s why socialists were excited for him. Because he would’ve been an organizer-in-chief. Every other politician rules the same standard way.

Well, Trump does a bit of the organizing thing, too, makes good use of the bully pulpit, and keeps up his movement between election cycles, but mostly to keep himself in power and enrich himself from them. Still, he’s done a similar thing of gotten a lot of non-voters to show up, and pushed the party right. Democrats could do the same thing, and actually push the party left if they wanted to try, instead of showing open contempt for leftists, but it’s admittedly harder because you’d have to fight the corporate owned media and pass legislation, or show you’re actually trying hard to help normal people in public.

I didn’t say my position. I’m just saying that you saying that we can avoid a genocide by voting for Biden is a lie. I wasn’t really making any wider comment, just on that statement specifically.

You can’t avoid a genocide actively ongoing by the incumbent on stage.

It is pretty funny he’s more willing to tell the truth on the conflict than Biden, though lol. The rest of the debate was lies, but he’s willing to tell the truth on how much he loved genocide.

You think they lost because Obama was too far to the left? He was extremely centrist in office.

So does Firefox make this more unique or something? I didn’t know this was a thing but I’m interested in privacy and it sound like something I should be looking into.

Haha I saw it as meaning in the first trimester a woman can get an abortion with just telling her doctor and having complete privacy without anyone else getting involved. In the second trimester, a doctor may get involved if there’s a medical emergency if they need to without the state being involved. I guess in the third trimester, and only then, is it up to each state if they want to get involved. There was some verbal weirdness in the way he said it, but I thought that was the general idea.

That’s incredible lol

Who?

Omg did Trump really say that? The first part of the sentence is true (and the only true thing I’ve heard him say in the debate so far), but the second as a follow up to that is plain fucking insane. Holy shit. Hitler level rhetoric on display.

The President has plenty of power here. They can halt shipments like he did one time, which proved he could try that. He could not veto ceasefire deals in the UN. He could assign a better secretary of state that doesn’t run interference for Israel. He could not jump the gun making pro Israel statements or supporting suppressing the protests, than staying otherwise silent when they do things wrong like even kill American aide workers or Palestinian journalists. He could veto laws that get to him. He could rile up the populace to contact their local Congressmen and publish Israel’s wrongdoings in press conferences, while he’s only been doing that for pro-Palestinian “wrong-doing”, often getting the facts wrong in the process. He could threaten Israel harder to let aid through the ground. Even if some of these fail, it shows who he supports at least.