Williamson is an absolute loon and Walz wants to stay governor.

Agree, but still slightly higher than Biden, imo.

Politicians aren’t activists, you’re just confused on how the system works. If you want politicians to change the only thing you can do is apply pressure through their constituents. That means changing minds and motivating people to action. Politicians want to stay in office and largely will be swayed by a shift in public opinion. The right wing is winning because their brand of crazy is highly motivated. It’s easier to moan on the Internet than change minds and change laws.

But changing laws is not as hard as most people believe. A handful of motivated people can change a state law simply by convincing people in their district to call and apply pressure on their behalf. Constituent lobbying is incredibly effective, 10 people convince 10 people each to apply pressure to the right people and suddenly a 45/55 vote becomes 51/49 seemingly over night. I’ve been a part of that more than once to great success. You just gotta put in the work.

Changing minds is harder though, we are competing against media conglomerates that mostly don’t care about truth. But it can happen with work.

Over time that work translates into different politicians, the state I’m in (Minnesota) keeps inching left a hair at a time because the work that is needed keeps happening. It doesn’t happen fast, but it does happen.

What I’m saying is, if you only show up on voting day and just complain all other days don’t be surprised when the country moves right. Political change happens every single day of the year, voting is just the political act that reflects that work. We get wet farts like Biden because little of the work is done by the left the make substantive change to our culture. Much of the left views whining as a political act and no more.

Parties don’t decide where the country moves politically, citizens do. If you want people to move left, you have to put in the work to change minds. You don’t sway people at the ballot box. All voting is, is a poll of what people already think and parties try to match their candidates to that poll. The reason our politicians are terrible, is because our people are.

A public servant that gets off on enforcing an unjust disproportionate entrenched system. Executioners are public servants by definition too, should I respect them as well? Prosecutors are mostly goobers.

It’s not that simple, if gaining undecided votes comes at the cost of more votes than they gain then you’re not going to win. That has been the struggle of the Dems for decades on every progressive issue.

Most of those where cops only larping as military. Military operations are a completely different thing. No country wants to fight their own people. Your own logistics, intelligence, supply chains, and financing all rely, in part, on the very people you are fighting… You can’t trust or count on the chain of command at any point, at any point your keys to power can turn on you and you’re dead. Leaders with half a brain know you usually don’t have a long life attacking your own people.

Domestic wars are never pretty, no matter how powerful the military. Most people in the military don’t serve to shoot their own country. Countries don’t want to damage their own infrastructure or enflame their own people. Oligarchs won’t support a war that damages their bottom line. People vastly over simply how easy it would be to stop an armed resistance.

Getting caught up with semantics arguments seems like a waste of energy. Because, genocide or not, for many people impacted by any war with disproportionate power imbalance, it sure as fuck is as horrific as a genocide regardless of how one defines it. (I’m not necessarily criticizing the use of the word by some, I just think many activists get bogged down in defending the use word rather than addressing the horror.)

Any regular person putting significant cash in individual stocks instead of index funds is just gambling. All US broad market index funds beat inflation over every 10 year period since index funds have existed.

Transportation pales in comparison to heating and cooling homes and businesses. The single greatest thing we can do to reduce climate change from a policy standpoint involves reducing that. From work at home, to multi family zoning, to converting business skyscrapers into living space, to increasing efficiency and fossil fuels from energy production. And all that does a lot to improve transportation environmental costs as well.

Under your simplified system a person making 55k brings in less than someone making 49k. Which disincentives getting a raise at that salary range. There is a reason that currently we only tax money over the brackets set.

Progressive taxation isn’t really the problem here though, our low tax on investment profit is. We should also probably enforce a 2% wealth tax on anyone making over a billion dollars.

Plenty of states it’s much higher, in Minnesota the rate is set by the state according to patient need. It’s not unheard of to pay $15k a month as $14k month is the average cost per resident.

“They constantly attack the right” if you view reporting what they have learned from investigation as an attack on the right, you should really asses what you think journalism’s role is. Should they report belief as truth, or truth as truth? “Only have liberal guests on” this is an obvious lie, and makes me question whether you ever actually listen to NPR or if you just have severe confirmation bias and view ANY liberal or Democrat on as proof of no conservatives even when they have both on at the same time… I hear conservatives on there pretty regularly.

What is true is that slightly more of the guests are Democrats than Republicans, but NPR has been very honest about how difficult it has been to get Republicans on their channel. They might ask 12 Republican senators to come on before one agrees meanwhile the first Democrat they ask agrees. With the decades long effort by the right to delegitimize any news that isn’t their tightly controlled propaganda machine, is this a surprise?

I don’t think it’s proof of bias to just attempt to report the investigative results of their work and have one party be anti-truth and then claim bias. Real news channels have an obligation to report reality irregardless of one parties unsubstantiated belief in anti-science, anti-fact, and anti-democracy demagoguery.

With that said, their is no such thing as unbiased news as humans are all biased. At least channels like NPR attempt to be unbiased, unlike the hundreds of propaganda rags all over this country.

Let’s say an extremist faction of Mexico, that had power and was integrated into the government came north and captured 240 people and killed another 1200. How do you think the US would respond? Would many in this country or other countries call our inevitable outsized retaliation genocide? If you don’t say no you’re a liar. One has to recognize the geopolitical lense people view Israel from and the desperate need for some to propagandize Israel as genocidal. That doesn’t make it true, and neither does desperately repeating it as often as possible. If anything it weakens your argument because it makes you seem like a clown to any serious person.

The Likud in Israel needs Hamas as much as Hamas needs the Likud. They both derive all of their power from a protracted conflict. There is no incentive to culturally and ethnically destroy the Palestinian people, because the day that happens is the day the Likud cease to exist. Netanyahu has shown over his political career that opportunism and power are his only driving forces, not cultural homogeneity and genocide. If you’re going to make an argument that it’s genocide you need to back it with coherent thought beyond, “but innocent people are dying”. If that’s your metric then all wars are genocide and the word looses all meaning.

What Israel is doing is awful, but it’s not genocide.

One of your polls is from 2012, wtf… You’re pulling these out of your ass.

One side has a leader with 30% of the vote and the other side hasn’t voted for 20 years…

Words matter, war and genocide are 2 different things. I know it’s in vogue to call it genocide right now, but killing 0.4% of a population is not remotely genocide. It’s certainly a one sided retaliatory war that is grotesque and shouldn’t be happening. But if Isreal fails there is a chance millions of Jews die, again, we’re talking 22,000 vs millions. I suspect that is the impossible situation foreign policy analysts have to weigh when deciding what to do next.

If Iran won a war against Israel at least some of the more extreme in Iran want extermination. You could potentially be trading an incredibly one-sided war with a possible second Holocaust. Many of the most extreme political factions in surrounding countries want Israel wiped off the map and replaced with a Muslim theocracy. If you destabilize the area you’re risking worse than is currently happening.

I don’t think that means the USA should be giving Israel a blank check, but I’m also not a foreign policy expert and I suspect the diplomatic situation is far more complex than you and I can comprehend sitting comfortably on our couch. Especially since holding Israel accountable is also not as popular domestically as it seems in online communities like this one. So any diplomatic pressure has to be behind closed doors.