One of the big problems with lesser evil voting is that a lot of people forget they still voted for evil.

Hannah Arendt wrote it better but I can’t be bothered to look up and copy the full quote.

What a long winded way of saying “ur stupid”. Thank you for your thoughtful contribution to the convo.

Little known fact about Kamala Harris: she was actually part of the administration that sent close to 20 billion dollars in aid to help Israel commit the genocide. Pretty high up on the totem pole too.

I don’t have a specific Harris quote, but her running mate Walz said “The expansion of Israel… is an absolute fundamental necessity for the US”.

Maybe this makes you go “AHA! Gotcha, no quote!” But if, during the holocaust, I saw someone shipping heaps of zyklon B to Germany, have a running mate that said “well actually, it seems pretty great that Germany invaded Poland”, and who refuses to use the word genocide to describe the holocaust that they helped commit, that would be enough for me to conclude they’re a nazi. You’d have to be pretty fucking stupid not to. Or just not care, in which case, fuck you.

There’s a really, really big gap between “support Palestinians” and “support the genocide of the palestinians”. And Harris sat aaaalll the way on the wrong side of that gap. And no, I don’t think that can be forgiven.

And fuck you for belittling the magnitude of the genocide. You’re in here with this “what was she supposed to do, not support the genocide?” attitude, and it’s absolutely sickening. Because yes, that is exactly what you should expect from a human fucking being. To not support the mass murder of children. But apparently, to you, this is some unreasonable purity test. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

One of these is not like the others

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dancing-frogs-unicorns-protest-portland-war-zone-rcna236887

Look, each time, in the past, arguments like this existed, and each time we sent arms, the region ended up in a fucked state. But let’s not learn from history.

Yeah sure whatever, let’s pretend your question wasn’t rhetorical. What you’re doing here is called weaponised standpoint epistemology. Starting from a very valid base, namely “some aspects of things you can’t know without having experienced them” you extend to “you can’t know anything unless you were there”, which is not valid. You don’t want to talk about how Americans are flushing their democracy down the toilet and doing nothing to prevent it? Fine. But I’m not going to pretend that this is anything other than you putting your head in the sand.

Given the track record of the impact this has had on the locals whenever the US has done this, however justified the dissidents’ cause, I completely agree with you. It has brought us such beauties as Suharto, Pinochet, and the silent holocaust. Glad we could find some common ground here.

Are you familiar with the term “thought terminating cliché”?

More to the point, politics in America is, perhaps more than some other nations, suffused into daily life in almost every public interaction in some way, shape, or form. And presuming to have an understanding of that while never participating in that public life - and furthermore judging such aspects based on one’s non-involvement with the assuredness of a wise veteran participant - is bullshit.

I don’t accept this epistemology at all. The idea that the only way to meaningfully know about a thing is to live the thing itself is complete nonsense. “Oh you think light behaves simultaneously as a wave and as a particle? Well have you ever been a particle?” Such a joke

Yes, the order of the guys.

You’re projecting a little bit. Just because you’re not educated on the politics of nations outside your own, doesn’t mean folks from other nations aren’t educated about yours. And I’m not trying to be an asshole here and call you stupid, because you’re not! It doesn’t make sense for you to learn about Belgian politics because in the end, nothing they can do will ever really affect you.

The converse is not true. American politics affects the rest of the world a great deal, and so we’re almost forced to learn about it. You’d be surprised how many Italians have an opinion about the electoral college, or gerrymandering.

You may not know about protests in Spain, but we sure as shit see yours. And we see you getting shot in the streets. And yes, you look like fucking clowns letting what semblance of a democracy you had slip from your fingers.

No, not great. Destabilizing a region is not good for the folks who live there.

Not to get too “um actually” on this but Sputnik 1 predates Explorer 1

For context, what OP means by “cleaning” webcomics is removing artist attribution. Look through their post history. And the answer why people don’t do this is clear: because it’s an unbelievably shitty thing to do.

Kansas, Texas, Indiana, Tennessee, and other states

Does anyone know the other states?

Some people over here can’t understand that sensitive questions can be asked without bad intent.

This just screams mott and bailey fallacy. It is very reminiscent, for example, of transphobes complaining that they get attacked for having the gall of claiming “sex is real”. And that’s basically what happened here. You said some upsetting shitty things in the thread about the two child policy, and now you’re whining about people getting upset about it. Go touch some grass.

Slavery is still legal in the US as per the 13th amendment.

Saying all that to essentially arrive at

“Were these built to house people? Yes. But were these built to house people? No.”

is very reminiscent of Beetlejuice of the Howard Stern Show.

I mean you’re probably right I guess, the Soviets probably built these houses nefariously or whatever, but still it’s a funny conclusion to have.