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Joined 10 days ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2025

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  • [CITATION NEEDED]

    He’s had people involved in backroom negotiations for months. Yes, it is a dirty tactic. This has a lot of undertones of Reagan’s deal with the Iranians. He didn’t have great intentions in negotiating a ceasefire, but he did manage to do it. And Trump has shown a willingness in the past to hold US military aid as a stick to change the behavior of allies. It’s reasonable to think he did the same thing here.

    The US DOES have substantial control over Israel. Reagan for instance dramatically affected Israel’s behavior by withholding weapons. Biden was more permissive of Israel than Reagan was.







  • A slightly bigger bomb won’t change anything materially on the ground in Gaza. The only significant change recently has been a cease fire. Whether it will hold or not is as yet unknown. But at least so far, Trump has somehow actually managed to be better on Gaza than Biden. Trump has shown a willingness to actually use the carrots and sticks of US foreign policy to produce outcomes. Biden offered unconditional support to Israel, while Trump seems to have forced them to come to the peace table by threatening to withhold support. In other words, Trump did what Biden’s base had been begging him to do for a year.

    It’s possible all this falls apart. And it is possible that Trump will prove far worse, for example by allowing an annexation of the West Bank. But so far at least, Trump has actually been a lot better for the Palestinians than Biden. Biden and Harris fundamentally do not accept that Israel should ever be held accountable for anything.

    I don’t think Trump did the cease fire out of moral concerns; I’m sure it was purely self-serving on his part. But he was actually willing to use the US’s various carrots and sticks to force through a cease fire agreement. That is something Biden never had the balls to do.


  • Refusing to hold Democrats accountable is also voting for Fascism. If your vote is 100% reliable to the Dems, they don’t have to do anything to win your vote. And thus, they can completely ignore you and everything you care about. The Dems have moved so far to the right that modern Republican Fascism doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to many people by comparison. After all, Democrats firmly embraced what was far-right immigration policy just a few years ago. Democrats have made a hard turn to the right. This has forced Republicans to move even further right into Fascism. And if things continue down this path, with Democrats never being held accountable, eventually both Democrats and Republicans will be overtly Fascist.

    That is what happens if a party is never held accountable.


  • Where do you draw the line? The problem with “vote Blue no matter who” is that you give the Democrats more and more license to drift further and further right.

    Kamala thought wrongly that she could completely abandon the progressive base. She fully embraced conservative positioning on Israel, the US border, and other issues. She ran a right wing campaign, compromising issue after issue to appeal to centrist Republicans.

    Kamala’s degeneracy was only possible because of the attitude you espouse. Because as long as progressives are willing to “vote Blue no matter who,” there is nothing to prevent Democrats from drifting ever-further to the right.

    The modern political landscape exists precisely because of the fact that for decades, progressives have been voting “Blue no matter who.” Democrats haven’t had to work hard to secure their base; they’ve taken them for granted. This has allowed Democrats to slip further to the right. As Democrats have slipped further right, Republicans have responded by moving into outright Fascism.

    You are unwilling to ever hold Democrats accountable. And by doing so, you guarantee that eventually the presidential race will be “KKK vs neo-Nazis,” as Democrats themselves drift into Fascism.



  • Of course there could be rulings on anything. But you’re inventing the “specificity” argument from whole cloth. Historically, there has never been any ruling establishing such limits on presidential pardons. And it’s not even on the radar of potential rulings circulating in right-wing circles. There are a lot of dubious legal theories that right wingers have proposed, such as creative interpretations to get around birthright citizenship. But there aren’t conservative legal scholars out there arguing that the pardoning power should be redefined.

    The court could also just straight-up rule various demographic groups to be illegal and worthy of imprisonment without trial. There’s really no point on worrying about purely hypothetical rulings that have no evidence that they are even being considered.

    The is an invention entirely of your own creation.