Oh, this is WAY worse than 2016.
Before, people said that Biden was fine. Now, they’re saying, “There’s just no way to change, so we have to accept it.”
Bullshit. This is supposed to be a democracy, and every volunteer and staffer and voter and activist and voter needs to rattle the bars of the cage that the Democratic party is trying to put us in. Do. Not. Let. Biden. Do this to us.
I think you’re out of touch.
Fascism isn’t unpopular. It’s very popular when people are feeling desperate.
I keep hearing people say stuff like this: He can’t win! He’s so fascist! He can’t win, Biden did such a good job if you actually look at the facts!
That’s not how elections work. People vote based on what they think will satisfy their interests, and a lot voters don’t see any reason to vote for Biden, and so they’ll stay home. People don’t need to vote for Trump for Trump to win. They just need to give in, and Biden is a “give in” machine. He’s poison to voter hope or enthusiasm, and he’s going to lose if he doesn’t get off the ticket.
If we want to take the threat of Trump seriously, no more hiding our heads in the sand.
Unfortunately, this is not in touch with the reality of our situation.
I find people, when trying to cope with the hard truth that Biden is going to lose, revert to talking about how much he SHOULD win.
He should. He’s been a pretty good president (a genocide not withstanding).
That’s not really relevant. Because if he loses, we are likely to lose our democracy. And currently, he’s going to lose.
He is losing in the polls. He has been losing in the polls and the swing states for the entire election. At some point, this needs to change, or we’re going to watch Trump get reelected. And last night made clear that as long as he is the candidate, this isn’t going to change. When he applied all his effort to proving he could win the election he failed spectacularly.
I don’t just mean flubbing lines. I mean he lost complete control of the narrative. He demonstrated that when trying his absolute hardest, he cannot reliably explain to voters why the vote for him. That isn’t a debate problem. That’s a fundamental candidate problem that doesn’t appear fixable (except with a new candidate).
If he were winning, at least by a little, we could pretend that maybe that’s not a big deal. But he’s not. He is losing. He has been losing the entire campaign, and if he doesn’t step aside, the election result will be the same as every time pollsters have asked in the last year:
President Donald Trump.
No more “it’s not that bad”. This debate is a clear synopsis of the campaign until now, and the outcome in November. If this debate “isn’t that bad”, you might as well say losing is not that bad. (It is. It really is.)
This is why they should’ve had a primary.
We could’ve watched Biden collapse months ago while figuring out who is actually fit to run a good campaign. Now we’re going to have to go through it the hard way, because they tried to hide from the obvious for about the last 8 months.
That’s true, but I don’t think they can do that with Biden at the top of the ticket. He’s spoiled goods.
I’m not a Democrat. I left and joined the Green Party. I’m that crazy lefty. But even I can readily concede that I’d like democrats to win, and I think they could with someone like Elizabeth Warren. Or Cory Booker.
I’m not demanding Bernie or AOC or that Ro Khana be the nominee. But don’t act like there aren’t a few Democrats who have credibly taken a stand once or twice in their career for the greater good. They aren’t the majority, but they’re not so rare as you couldn’t find one.
We don’t have much control over this, frankly. But if we have any, I say we use it.
My personal attitude is that although I will concede that it is possible for Biden to win, if we don’t want to have to hope for a prayer, the only way things get better is if we all pop the bubble that Biden and his supporters are in that they can just ignore reality and hope for the best.
It has to be so clear to the Democratic party that not only are they likely to lose this election (and obviously with it, democracy), but they’re going to lose their jobs. No one who works in the election industrial complex is going to keep getting invited to cocktail parties and get hired on for whatever Potempkin election follows this one if Trump wins. No LARPing that they’re “the resistance!” in their endless fundraising emails while they enjoy being in the minority FOREVER. Rattle the fucking cage. Make it clear we blame them for this nonsense, and will continue to assign them the blame for choosing to run a failing candidate in a time of crisis because no one wanted to be the one to speak up and suggest doing anything else.
People keep getting mad when I criticize Biden, as if doing so is helping Trump win. My take: NOT doing so is helping Trump win. Protest this guy like our lives depend on him dropping out of the race at the convention. (They might).
Well that’s dystopian and dark.
I shouldn’t bother responding to this, but I have to point out that this weird assumption that scholars of Christianity are all Christian partisans seems pretty similar to people who say that climatologists are all biased in favor of a global warming hoax.
You don’t think anyone goes into studying a field to challenge the orthodoxy? That’s the fastest way to get famous. Even if the rest of your field hates you, you can make an incredibly lucrative career out of being “the outsider”. I literally linked to a collection of experts who agree with you.
If you don’t believe the experts, I guess it’s fine. But it’s weird when people use expertise on a subject as proof of bias to discredit expertise. It’s just such a silly thing to do.
I didn’t say which side I come down on. I just said that there is lots of information with plenty of high quality citations.
I’m really happy that everyone is a winner.
It’s weird how many people in this thread are vaguely debating the validity of the historical research into this question when one person has posted a link to a well cited article on this very very heavily studied subject.
There’s even a link to a well cited article examining the skepticism of the historicity of Jesus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory
I don’t feel compelled to argue an interpretation. The facts are well documented and their interpretations by experts available. What anyone chooses to do with these are of no real concern to me.
I really try not to get into litigating each and every instance, but I feel compelled sometimes to point out a few things:
The claim that Abdallah Aljamal was holding hostages is not credible. This claim was made by the IDF without evidence, and they have a very long history of fabricating post-hoc justifications for killing people they weren’t targeting or supposed to target. Examples include the assassination of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 and the killing of medic Rouzan al-Najjar in 2018. In both cases, the IDF was caught lying to justify their murders, and I don’t think the claims about Abdallah Aljamal hold up at all. From what I read, he lived in the building one of the hostages was recovered from, but he wasn’t known as a target before he was killed. He was characterized as one after he was dead.
Overall, the concept of “valid targets” is bullshit. It is used to assuage our innate understanding that killing people – particularly the young, the innocent, the defenseless, the elderly – is WRONG. Israel has, in this particular war, extended the concept in a way that is clearly genocidal. Their target selection, as covered by 972, was wildly more vicious than their own historical limits on collateral damage. An anonymous Israeli intelligence officer called it “a mass assassination factory”.
I’m glad we agree that all the responsible parties for atrocities deserve to be held accountable. I don’t intend the above as a provocation to fight, but I want to make sure anyone reading this comment section is aware of this context.
It’s nuts that this is barely even news. Like… another day another atrocity.
I’m trying not to be numb to it, but it’s hard to remain shocked. I’m still disgusted, though.
I’ll say this, too: I think we too often judge wars by the conduct of the participants as though there are good wars and bad ones. And my hunch is that it’s more like there are bad ones and terrible ones, and as awful as this sounds, this one is more notable because it’s being well documented and it involves a uniquely fucked up context (decades of occupation with the support of the US). I think the way the Israeli right wing discusses it is uniquely brazen, and the degree to which the IDF targets journalists and medics seems high, but I think that this kind of stuff happens so often and is undercovered. I wish Yemen got the kind of coverage this is getting.
In terms of the atrocities, I think most wars are basically just a bunch of atrocities in a trenchcoat. It doesn’t make these any better: I just want this to end, and then all the other wars. Fuck this shit.
AND I want the people who do this shit dragged in front of the Hague. I’m very glad that Netanyahu and Gallant have had arrest warrants requested, but you know what I call that? A good start.
I think maybe execs and investors might feel it’s all the same, but if you’re a project manager for cloud infrastructure for enterprise services or you’ve been working for years on releasing a new component of Bing search that you think is a real gamechanger and some muckity-muck at the top says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that anymore: a property manager that’s owned by a private equity partner of one of our big investors wants the chatbot that schedules apartment viewings in Huntsville to be more flirty, so go massage the prompts to make it convincingly laugh at bad jokes,’ some of those folks are liable to start grumbling that this isn’t the role that they were pitched when they took this job.
I think this article omitted important further context by not describing the target selection approach the IDF was using: they had an AI tool make guesses as to who was part of Hamas, then suggest bombing runs of their homes when they were believed to be inside around meal times or sleeping. They reserved precision weapons for commanders, and used dumb bombs to kill low-ranking suspected combatants.
This approach is inherently designed to create a pretense to carpet bomb neighborhood full of families based on a process with little to know human oversight it discretion.
For details, look up “lavender” and “where’s Daddy”.
This is so, so fucked up.
It’s hard to grieve effectively in the face of so many tragedies. Here is another one.
That is very true. Joey Ayoub of The Fire These Times coined a phrase months ago for describing the mainstreaming of genocidal ideation among the public, which I keep returning to: “The Smotrich-ization of the Israeli public”. It’s real, and it’s terrifying.
Still, my impression is that Israelis are in a weird, weird, weird place:
I apologize that i don’t have sources for each of these, these are just a collection of insights I recall reading in the last few months.
Ultimately, I think they’re largely out of answers AND being herded aggressively by a well-tuned state propaganda machine, which means that I think their attitudes are in flux. I think they could be led in many directions, and many futures are possible. Right now though, the most successful shepherds are Smotrich and Ben-Givir.
Lastly, there are a few very small Palestinian-Jewish unity groups. These may look irrelevant considering their numbers are so few, but when people ask where we could find leaders capable of negotiating peace (considering most of the Palestinian ones have been killed to prevent any peace process), I think this would be where we’d find them. Despite their numbers, they terrify the far right. They face extreme threats of violence, and I think that reaction belies the threat they pose to Jewish Supremacy.
Yeah, and more importantly, Biden needs to learn the public component of diplomacy.
I read his interview in Time, and it’s weird, because it at least gave me some aspect into what he’s thinking.
He’s old as fuck. He has learned decades of procedures and standard practice in diplomacy, and he does NOT understand that a lot of it happens in the open now. Biden thinks he’s playing chess with all the diplomatic messages he sends along backchannels, and he has no idea that this is just an arm wrestling match now. People judge you by what you say and do transparently.
Biden legit thinks he and Bibi are like cousins who grew up together who are having a tough fight, and Bibi is all fucking politics. He’d slit any throat he has to get what he wants, and he will bury Biden in a heartbeat.
Biden should go to Israel, and in a public address announce that the country is turning a corner: it will be safer than ever, and America is going to assist with a long term peace process, which they won’t lead but will provide security guarantees for. And don’t tell Bibi any of this in advance. And when Bibi reacts, say that Bibi has lost his trust and that of the elected public, and they need to hold new elections before getting any new weapons. Get some 'nads, man!
I wouldn’t mind a complete cut-off in weapons, but I also wouldn’t mind if they continue to supply rocket defenses or something if its part of a pressure campaign to send Netanyahu packing. I want Israeli prosecutors and the Hague to argue over who gets to lock his ass up first.
That is very, very interesting. I thought you were just being cryptic, but I’m really glad I asked for clarity, because this was super informative. Thank you.
I have good news: It exists! http://retrographer.org/
A lot of them are unrecognizable, but here’s an example of a good one: http://retrographer.org/photos/4215
The bad news is that’s a bit limited. It was the senior project of a CMU student in 2010. It only exists for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you wanted to make one for another city, though, I think you could contact the creator, ask for the code, and then recruit people to get a ton of photos from another city’s historical institutions, and then crowdsource geotagging them (which is what the guy did).
I am here to gently wake you up.
Biden has been losing the whole time, pretty badly. I listened to Pod Save America to get their read, and one of them pointed out that predicted election outcomes can change in one of two ways: a major event can force a big shift, or you can rise or fall slowly over time. Tonight showed that neither is coming for Biden. At his best possible opportunity, he didn’t under perform, he made it far worse. The theory that he could slowly gain ground with media appearances is now popped.
Biden is a nice guy, but he’s experiencing a pretty normal cognitive decline, and voters aren’t going to magically come around to him when they’ve been telling pollsters for months that he’s going to lose.
That isn’t going to change unless the nominee changes. You’re right that this isn’t the end for Biden. But sadly, that’s because it’s actually been over for a long time. It’s time to pick up the pieces and begin the overdue work of fielding a competitive nominee.