she/her
- 10 Posts
- 53 Comments
This is tragic. We can expect more of this over the next four years at least.
The rule of law means that no one is above the law, not even the president. If the president is above the law then we do not have the rule of law. Being labeled a felon is the idea of a punishment, but since there are no consequences to this sentencing there is no punishment.
At least imposing a fine would have been consistent with precedent. At that point it would have been an issue with our laws being to lenient. That would have been a much more easily remedied problem than doing away with the rule of law, a founding concept of modern western civilization.
The rule of law was dead when the Supreme Court ruled presidents have immunity for core constitutional responsibilities and presumed immunity for official acts in Trump v. United States. This is another nail in the coffin.
Put a hold on that popcorn. It’s not a civil war. Elon and Trump are in agreement. What’s happening is some MAGA supporters are going through the five stages of grief. They seem to be somewhere around anger and bargaining. Trump conned his supporters like he conned his employees before them. Now Trump supporters are working their way to accepting Trump was always going to enrich himself and billionaires at their expense.
Now would be a good time to start pulling people away from MAGA. People need an alternative. Taking the wealth of billionaires as well as the source of their wealth would be a good start. Not to mention systemic change to our government’s institutions.
killing and/or ostracizing everyone on it who isn’t a
JewIsraeliPalestinians live in Israel and the Israel government does not care about Palestinian citizens of Israel. They claim to care about Jewish Israelis and Jews more broadly. A fascist makes a hierarchy not for the people at the top the hierarchy, but for the fascists. My only point was that Jews are at the top of the Zionist hierarchy, not that the Zionists in control of Israel care about Jews, because they do not.
Of course Israel and Russia, for that matter, do not really care about Jews or Russians respectively or people at all for that matter. Israel’s fascist government targets Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians because they are the other. A scope goat to misdirect class resentment from the owner class to minorities and foreigners.
Israel does not care about the safety of Jewish people. Their constant deflection about how their military actions are in the name of protecting Jewish people, and the intentional conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism, has only increased genuine antisemitism at the expense of Jewish people worldwide
No kidding and well said. I, as a Jew, am less safe now than before Israel’s genocide. The point is the genocide is being carried out in the name of Israeli Jews and Jews more broadly, which sucks. To be clear, I am anti-zionist and anti-fascist, but not antisemtic. Anti-zionism and anti-fascism should always go hand in hand because zionism is a form of fascism.
Also, as long as I’m dancing around using the word, I don’t particularly like the term diaspora Jew. I am not living in diaspora. I live in the US where I am full citizen. I have rights and freedoms here that are not preconditioned on whether or not I am Jewish. edit: typo
These dictatorships, and Israel with this current cabinet is effectively a fascist dictatorship, want to expand their sphere of influence and territory. They are willing to disregard the rules based order and risk WWIII even if that isn’t the goal.
The Middle East seems to be in this three way power struggle now between Turkey, Saudi Arabia backed by the US, and Iran backed by Russia. Iran is part of this axis with China, North Korea, and Russia. Turkey is in NATO and wants to be a EU member, but is an enemy of the Kurds a US ally.
The US wants Israel and Saudi Arabia to join in a defense pact so our two allies will help us maintain peace in the region. Saudi Arabia wants to be the leaders of a new caliphate in the Middle East that unites the countries and Muslims living there. Defense pacts with the US and Israel would help them do that. But the Middle East is united in their support of Palestine which means Israel needs to make concessions on Palestine or Saudi Arabia will never be seen as a legitimate leader of the Middle East.
So Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians is not only destabilizing the region and making Israel a pariah, it’s also knee capping Saudi Arabia’s ambitions. Saudi Arabia needs US support but they can’t be seen as an ally to a genocidal Israel.
At the same time Israel has undermined Iran’s proxy network which allowed Syrian rebels to win the civil war. Iran and Russia are now on the back foot in the region.
Rather than swoop in and be a uniter, Turkey is wasting time fighting the Kurds in Syria.
Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey all want to be the leaders of a future caliphate, but thanks to Israel none of them are in a position to get it. This is a terrible situation for the people living in the Middle East and in the long run can only lead to Israel getting more land, influence, and resources in the region.
At this point a country without strong foreign ties that emphasizes the idea of self-determination for countries in the Middle East is more likely to unite the Middle East than Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Turkey. If Syria could recover from the war quickly enough, they could be in an excellent position to do this, given the HTS leader’s talking points. HTS and the Kurds need to double down on an alliance and kick out ISIS and Turkey asap.
Peace in the Middle East is what is good for everyone in the long run, even if some people argue it could theoretically hurt US interests in the short run. A united Europe has benefited that region and the world tremendously. A new Middle Eastern super power might scare some policy people, but it would be an important counter balance to Russia, China, India, and Israel. Those four countries especially would happily carve up the Middle East into bits if they can as the US becomes isolationist under Trump. edit: typo
It depends how far Israel goes with this. Syria isn’t in a position to to pick fights or hold grudges. But Syrian rebel groups aren’t going to let Israel conquer them or leave them so debilitated someone else can conquer them. If Israel keeps it’s attacks to abandoned regime military equipment and the land grabs to the Golan Heights then Syrian rebel groups are probably going to let it slide for the foreseeable future.
Responding to Jolani, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, said: “We aren’t intervening in what is happening in Syria. We have no intention of administering Syria.”
It’s also important to remember that when Israel says they don’t want to administer other people or countries they mean they don’t want to rule other people, they want the land and resources. That’s why they are killing everyone in the Gaza strip and refusing to leave despite saying they don’t want to administer Palestinians. Forming a greater Israel means taking as much land as they can get away with and killing and/or ostracizing everyone on it who isn’t a Jew. edit: typo
This is a presidential action worth celebrating and defending. Great work! More please!
He is also the first President ever to issue categorical pardons to individuals convicted of simple use and possession of marijuana, and to former LGBTQI+ service members convicted of private conduct because of their sexual orientation.
Excellent!
The main allegations in the report are:
- The unprecedented scale and magnitude of the military offensive, which has caused death and destruction at a speed and level unmatched in any other 21st-century conflict;
- Intent to destroy, after considering and discounting arguments such as Israeli recklessness and callous disregard for civilian life in the pursuit of Hamas;
- Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm in repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, or deliberately indiscriminate attacks; and
- Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, such as destroying medical infrastructure, the obstruction of aid, and repeated use of arbitrary and sweeping “evacuation orders” for 90% of the population to unsuitable areas.
Looks like it.
The unethical CEO of the Umbrella Health, William Easton, and his team are abducted and William is forced to play a game and choose who will live or die to save his family and him.
Clinton pardoned his brother for selling cocaine. It’s not like this is the first time a Democrat has done this.
I didn’t know Clinton did that. Some how the Republicans in my life never mentioned that one. It wasn’t good when Clinton did it either though.
Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden is more notable because Democrats made it a part of their messaging that Biden wouldn’t pardon Hunter Biden. It was their moral line and Biden crossed it as soon as he had nothing left to lose. John explained it best, thankfully.
Thanks, this comment is an excellent example of why this pardon is so frustrating. Nepotism is not normal. This pardon is not normal. But if you didn’t know better, you could easily be swayed by this nonsensical comment.
We now have to defend against this kind of rhetoric thanks to Joe Biden.
To answer your question, I wouldn’t feel good, I would feel great.
I don’t care what you think I am. I want justice. The American people want justice. This isn’t justice. It’s corruption. We shouldn’t want corruption in the government, because that’s how countries deteriorate.
People want to live in a country with a fair justice system. Biden contributed to the system he says was unfair to his son and then saves his son from it. Biden is fucking off with his family, they got theirs. We don’t have a reason to defend Biden anymore. Blue MAGA isn’t useful for winning elections.
He’s got 48 days. It’s time for Joe to get writing.
I’m not a fan of the nepotism and I don’t plan on defending it. Biden claims he needs to do this to keep his family safe from an unfair system. If he’s going to do stuff like this and acknowledge our institutions are flawed how about do stuff for the American people, Ukraine, or anyone without the last name Biden. The peaceful transfer of power to fascism, but his family got theirs leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
That sucks. We need systemic change to our police departments.
That’s fair. Especially when it’s open secret that at least 30 of 37 conservative organization’s polls where skewed in Trump’s favor to make it look he’s building momentum.
https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2025-33892-004.html
We recruited 2,180 participants on Lucid between January 31 and February 17, 2020, about 9 months before the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Lucid, an online aggregator of survey respondents from multiple sources
https://support.lucidhq.com/s/article/Sample-Sourcing-FAQs
How are respondent incentives handled in the Marketplace?
Our respondents are sourced from a variety of supplier types who have control over incentivizing their respondents based on their business rules. Each incentive program is unique. Some suppliers do not incentivize their respondents at all, most provide loyalty reward points or gift cards, and some provide cash payments. Lucid does not control the incentivization models of our suppliers, as that’s part of their individual business models. The method of incentivization also varies; for instance, some suppliers use the survey’s CPI to calculate incentive, others LOI, or a combination of the two. Each respondent agrees to their panel’s specific incentivization method when they join.
So the study didn’t use a random sample. They took people who volunteered to do promotions that were funneled to together by one site. This is how we got those bogus polling data that Gen Z was secretly conservative because all the data was from YouGov.
The study they cite as justification really is about using Lucid over MTurk, not using Lucid over random samples. So they cite another study.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053168018822174
We would note, however, that even extremely idiosyncratic convenience samples (e.g. Xbox users; Gelman et al., 2016) can sometimes produce estimates that turn out to have been accurate.
https://researchdmr.com/MythicalSwingVoterFinal.pdf
The Xbox panel is not representative of the electorate, with Xbox respondents predominantly young and male. As shown in Figure 2, 66% of Xbox panelists are between 18 and 29 years old, compared to only 18% of respondents in the 2008 exit poll,4 while men make up 93% of Xbox panelists but only 47% of voters in the exit poll. With a typical-sized sample of 1,000 or so, it would be difficult to correct skews this large, but the scale of the Xbox panel compensates for its many sins. For example, despite the small proportion of women among Xbox panelists, there are over 5,000 women in our sample, which is an order of magnitude more than the number of women in an RDD sample of 1,000.
The idea is to partition the population into cells (defined by the cross-classification of various attributes of respondents), use the sample to estimate the mean of a survey variable within each cell, and finally to aggregate the cell-level estimates by weighting each cell by its proportion in the population…MRP addresses this problem by using hierarchical Bayesian regression to obtain stable estimates of cell means (Gelman and Hill, 2006).
Maybe this is a lack of stats knowledge on my part, but can a person really successfully math out the responses of demographics the study didn’t sample from when it mostly had respondents predominately from one age, one racial, and one sex demographic?
This seems like they are using math to make stuff up. It seems like the main driver of online surveys is to cut costs and save time for researchers. I’m taking this survey with a grain of salt for now. Maybe that’s just my bias though. =/
No, prevent as in stop Israel from finishing.
100% I have no confidence in Israel’s ability to comply with international law or humanitarian norms. As a jew, I am less safe because of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. There is no interest in self-defense or defeating terrorists. Netanyahu wants to prolong the war to stay out of prison and to create a greater Israel. Israel attacking the UN troops has really ticked me off too.
Even if our legal system was, that wouldn’t stop a fascist government from using the death penalty to kill its targeted out-groups indiscriminately. Also, the death penalty isn’t a useful tool because it doesn’t fundamentally correct the underlining social and economic conditions that lead to the kind of violence it fails to deter.
Under some subjective moral systems the death penalty aligns with an ideal of justice. However all it does is kill more people. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. That is to say, no one learns anything of value from this process and dead people cannot learn. Justice does not demand punishment equal to that of the crime. In other words, justice can be obtained without necessitating us commit the very actions we have deemed to be unacceptable.
We should want to live under a system that is more humane than the criminals it prosecutes. Our punishment for failing to do this will be to be subjugated by our own flawed system and to have no one to blame but ourselves.