banner80

joined 1 year ago
[–] banner80@fedia.io 0 points 1 month ago (6 children)

? It's a cartoon, I don't see it trying to pass as a real picture of 3 people with a transcript of what was said in regular conversation.

Given the title of "civics", what I understood from this is that anything we say in current politics can be said reasonably, and people can choose to be decent, respectful and gainful in how they interact with each other. Lots of people and places have rules against "politics" talk because we can't behave ourselves. But being divisive is not a requirement of politics, that's just us being assholes.

The people in the cartoon are showing us that you can also talk about these issues respectfully and working together.

For instance, lots of assholes around these parts come in with their pro-Hamas rhetoric talking about how the US is supporting genocide, acting like the rest of us are happy with children being bombed. The difference is not that we support genocide, the difference is that we don't think the answer is anywhere near as simple as they want to make it. That region is full of religious hate and ignorance with roots of bloodthirst that go back thousands of years, and it will not be fixed overnight with any one policy.

And where is the outrage about Sudan? https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/22/africa/sudan-darfur-humanitarian-aid-intl/index.html

10 million people have fled their homes due to civil war, the WHO says 8.5 million peoples are at emergency levels of food insecurity, and the UN is warning that the death toll could be 4 million people if we don't intervene aggressively https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/08/21/g-s1-18004/famine-hunger-sudan-united-nations-food-insecurity

Let me be clear. My president in the US and his Secretary of State are already working hard on finding a cease-fire deal in Gaza, and the entire West alliance is putting pressure on Israel to end their operations. But who is working to do something for Sudan? While all these pro-Hamas drones are plastering the internet with Hamas propaganda and doing shenanigans at the DNC to get attention, yet nobody gives a shit about 4 million impending deaths by famine because they didn't see it on tiktok. Where are the calls to hear from a Sudanese-American at the Dem convention?

And here we are with this cartoon asking me to find a way to listen to the pro-Hamas tiktok simpletons, and try to communicate with them to find some common ground. It's hard, but it's true that we don't HAVE to be assholes, we just are for now. The one side starts at asshole and goes from there, and it brings out only the asshole out of the other side. Same for any topic. But it doesn't have to be that way, it's just the way we are doing it.

Now, for a practical demonstration, watch the response from the pro-Hamas simpletons.

[–] banner80@fedia.io 11 points 1 month ago

Trump will sue you constantly over petty BS like the state of your home's paint job and some made up story about how you hit his trash cans with your hummer truck (when you don't even own a hummer), and Vance would wait for you to be stuck in the hospital caring for a loved one to file a HOA motion on your home because you forgot to mow the lawn that week.

Kamala is the neighbor that shows you how to fight Vance's HOA motion, and Tim Walz shows up the next day and mows your lawn with his own riding mower without even asking you about it.

[–] banner80@fedia.io 29 points 1 month ago

I know it's hard to find real images of these families since most pics online are going to be PR-approved. But that image of the Vance family is quite disingenuous.

The Vances are cosplaying as a regular rural family, but he is an Ivy graduate who sold himself to a twisted libertarian billionaire, and she is a highly paid Ivy lawyer that has worked with the corrupt conservative SCOTUS judges. A real picture of those 2 would be in fancy dressing at an exclusive cocktail party for the dirty right-wing powers trying to control the country. Far from salt-of-the-earth Americans just trying to live their lives.

[–] banner80@fedia.io 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Nobody that understands how this works could have said that. Once you are already at war, it's either sending more thousands of American soldiers with guns firing at anything that moves, and then civilians die anyway, or use the drones to shoot at targets with precision, and then civilians die anyway. The only people that think civilian deaths during war are 100% avoidable are people that have no idea what they are talking about and like to wax lyrical from behind a keyboard.

There was one other place where it could have been stopped, and that's earlier by preventing war mongers from gaining power and starting the wars in the first place. I'm sure you did your part then using your vote effectively to prevent Republicans from gaining power for 8 years, just as you are ready to vote effectively now to prevent a Republican from returning this Nov.

[–] banner80@fedia.io 6 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Those are military choices. People need to stop imagining these law-degree prime ministers as kings that control every aspect of government. The military had been developing drones for a while, and having superior tech wanted to use them more. The wars were started by the Republican jackasses before Obama and we were already stuck in them. There's a very limited playbook Obama could draw from to have any influence in that situation. He simply did what any US president would have done by continuing with the mess left by the previous admin and following the recommendations of the generals when it comes to the approach to war. Military stuff was one of Obama's weakest knowledge areas, so he did what any educated person would do and simply let the seasoned experts handle it.

If you ask me WHEN I had a problem with it, it was when we let Bush start a series of unwinnable wars promising it would be done in 3 months and over some BS excuse that everyone knew was nonsense going into it. I don't blame Obama too much for the tech advancements in drones, and I don't blame Biden too harshly for the exit out of Afghanistan. I blame the morons that create that unsolvable problem, promising it would be cheap and easy and would go great.

[–] banner80@fedia.io 32 points 1 month ago (17 children)

Obama knew from a young age he wanted to be in politics, so he lived his life as neatly as possible towards that objective, including graduating with honors from top American schools and leaving a manicured political track record of his path.

Republicans wanted so hard to hate on him but they couldn't find anything. He ran an excellent presidency, he spoke very carefully with great charisma, and his background was pristine.

That's why any controversies about Obama had to be fabricated. Republicans attacked him for the mustard, the color of one of his suits, how he rode a bike, how he was physically fit and very good at basketball (an urban sport). They fabricated claims on his birth certificate. They blamed him for stuff that happened on someone else's watch (why didn't Obama keep us safe on 9/11? Why didn't he prevent the economic crash of 2008?)

They attacked him with that nonsense because they couldn't find anything else to attack him on.

[–] banner80@fedia.io 17 points 1 month ago (6 children)

It's the new line of Republican attacks on Kamala as they try anything they can think of.

They found out that she likes Doritos, because she said that when she won her election for the Senate in 2016, she ate a bag of Doritos watching the election results on TV as she mentally accepted the mandate to fight for her state of California against whatever Trump had in store to antagonize them. So now Republicans have decided that eating Doritos when pondering on one's life is beneath the dignity of a head of state.

https://www.salon.com/2024/08/20/are-you-kidding-me-fox-news-guest-fumes-over-kamala-harris-eating-a-bag-of-doritos/

[–] banner80@fedia.io 16 points 1 month ago

It is a known fact that briefly dating Montrel Williams several decades ago, when you are both available singles, provides a direct path to becoming the Leader of the Free World. I tried it myself but couldn't get Montrel to set a date for a movie night no matter how desperate my DMs. Ah, to think I could have been a contender.

Yet I, for one, am glad that Mr. Trump's dating history is unimpeachable, because I don't think I could handle 2 risqué backgrounds in a single presidential season.

[–] banner80@fedia.io 14 points 1 month ago (4 children)

It's crazy how Trump can't stop talking about how attractive he finds Kamala. He has compared her to his imported model wife, and to Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor, and then recently he decided enough is enough and went on a rant about how he himself is hotter than Kamala.

I don't remember a single Dem politician or pundit going there at all. Everyone was busy scrutinizing her record, her success chances, and her policy platform for the next 4 years. But then again, I don't remember Dems going far out of their way to call every female politician dumb and unhinged, as is customary in Republican campaigning. This weird cult of sexualizing every woman while calling her stupid, no matter the scenario. She could be an accomplished lawyer with an economics undergrad, wearing a pantsuit covered from neck to toes, and they'll still go there.

[–] banner80@fedia.io 11 points 2 months ago

I think, since the lettuce won that race, we don't really know when the lettuce would have finally wilted. We just know that Truss was no match.

[–] banner80@fedia.io 49 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The Mooch was one of the many officials to come and go in the Trump admin. Anthony Scaramucci, affectionately known as "The Mooch," lasted 10 days of chaos before being shown the door.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40806586

Since then, the mooch is accepted as a unit of time equal to 10 days in the metric system, or 11 days if measuring in imperial (his actual term was something like 10.6 days). The defacto use of a mooch for measuring time in the US is the metric 10 days per mooch.

The mooch is an appropriate unit of time to measure the duration of failed political positions. Another unit of time that serves this purpose is the lesser-known British Truss, which is 49 days imperial. That one is often reserved for failed heads of state.

JD Vance was nominated on July 15, so by Aug 16 he has latest 32 days so far. That would be 3.2 mooches. I guess this meme was made to stay fresh for a few days, optimistically presuming Vance will make it to at least 4 full mooches.

[–] banner80@fedia.io 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)
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