I feel like I would be more okay with this is snap didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

Look man I don’t know how old you are, but this type of comment is what I’d expect a teenager to write. it’s not just that you’re acting like a massive asshole; You’re using insults and arguments that I’d expect a teenager to come up with. It’s the sort of argument that only works if the vast majority of people in the audience are already both deeply in your corner and also immature. Otherwise you’d just come off looking like a massive jackass.

Do you have any experience talking to people outside of an echo chamber? How does that go for you?

This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.

There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.

To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.

Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.

An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.

The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.

Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.

Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.

A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.

Look I gotta say I’m not seeing this. Of all the things that would inspire someone to look inwards, I don’t see “not being a good guest host of a late night comedy show” or “booed at someone else’s standup comedy routine” as being good examples. That’s the kind of shit high schoolers think adults care about.

I thought the Cybertruck would be his wake up call, but somehow that is the best selling EV pickup in all of North America.

You can get knocked down without being destroyed. Like if he were just forced from his CEO positions they would be great.

I keep waiting for this guy to be knocked down a peg and it never really ends up happening. The only time he seemed genuinely embarrassed was when he had to back out of that Zuckerberg fight.

Okay man, believe what you want to believe. I’ve already wasted enough time on you.

There is absolutely nothing I could show you that could change your mind. You phrased your original comment as a good faith question, but in reality you were trying to give yourself ammunition to attack me with.

Your take isn’t even rational. If I thought there was any chance of you changing your mind, I would go through your comment detail by detail showing what arguments you have that are wrong, where you twisted my words, and what claims you avoided.

You’d just respond with more bullshit and more bad faith arguments, until I eventually lost my temper. Arguing with someone like you is a complete waste of time.

Lol, every fucking time. The initial question was in bad faith, the response has misinformation, and there’s always some nonsense moral implication. Yet if I just didn’t respond there would be someone commenting something along the lines how “it’s pretty telling” I don’t engage with this crap.

I feel that this is not an honest question, but an attempt for me to state more concrete positions which you will then attack me for using misinformation and bad faith emotional arguments. I’m guessing it’ll be in the form of going bullet point by bullet point, and then with some witty last sentence implying I’m a bad person or a mossad sock puppet.

I’ll state a few obvious ones, in case I’m wrong

• The phrases “intifadah revolution” and “from river to the sea” are blantant antisemitic dog whistles. They are direct references to previous attempts to destroy Israel and terror attacks on Jews worldwide. Despite this, they are still ultimately accepted in liberal circles
• Liberals repeatedly refer to Israel as a European colonial ethnostate state. This is extremely misleading on multiple aspects. The most notable is 22 percent of the Israeli population is Arab, while the largest ethnic subgroup of Jews are mizrahi Jews.
• I’ve heard the Nakba mentioned a million times, but I never hear discussion about how basically every Arab state forced their entire Jewish population into Israel via violence and ethnic cleansing. Hence the reason for the large Mizrahi Jewish population
• College campuses have handled antisemitism claims with kid gloves, because the antisemitism comes from progressive coded groups. Their response would have been completely different if conservative groups were acting in the same way, or if black, Asian, or queer folks were targeted in a similar manner.

The top comments on this post alternate between blaming Israel, claiming the IDF accidentally killed the hostages and blamed Hamas, and claiming the IDF executed the hostages themselves as a psyop.

There is clearly a huge portion of liberals that have extreme issues when it comes to treating this conflict with any sort of nuance or objectivety. They see the conflict primarily though the lens of the US culture wars, are extremely comfortable with declaring themselves informed after reading a few curated social media posts and watching a John Oliver video, and are extremely confident that anyone who disagrees with them is either morally or intellectually inferior.

That mentality works fine when you’re dealing with straightforward issues like legalizing weed or trans bathroom laws, but completely fails here. Geopolitics in general is extremely complicated, the middle east is a particularly complicated issue for geopolitics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a particularly complicated issue for the middle east. Despite all this you have people running around with an extreme amount of self assurance that their barely informed zero nuance outlook is unquestionably correct. It’s absolutely insufferable.

Look honestly I don’t think this is that dystopian.

Smoke detectors existed in bathrooms forever. The main use in high school seems to be catching particularly dumb teenagers smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. When I was in high school they were tuned to be super sensitive to the point where water vapor could set one off. I remember one time where the entire school had to stand out in the rain after a fire alarm went off, in what was later determined to be just two teenagers smoking in the bathroom.

Teachers also have been trying to catch students smoking for like 50 years. Back in the 20th, there were assistant principals that basically roamed the halls looking for whiffs of cigarette smoke. Part of the reason memes about hanging out under the bleachers started is because it was the best place to smoke on account of being outside, out of the way, and old school gym teachers just not giving a fuck.

This dudes app just seems like a modern update on very old concepts. Instead of teenagers smoking cigarettes, they are vaping. Instead of a smoke detector, you have something designed specifically for vapes. Instead of some super anal assistant principal on patrol, you have some super anal assistant principal sprinting across the school. Who knows, maybe this is the thing that forces teenagers to touch grass because I’m willing to there aren’t vape detectors under the bleachers and gym teachers still don’t give a fuck.

American here. Does Canada have any domestic auto manufacturers?

I actually have more respect for Pelosi after this.

She willingly stepped down in 2022. Her first reaction was to refuse to comment, and not exert pressure. She seemed to genuinely want either Joe Biden to come to the conclusion that he can’t run on his own and/or Hakeem Jefferies to lead the charge to have him step down.

It was only after Jefferies proved himself pretty much useless that she inserted herself back into the primary role. She proceeded to prove that, despite everything ,she’s incredibly capable in a way that no other democrat can match.

Regardless of how the election turns out, I think we can all agree that Biden was a massive liability for Democrats. While I have personal issues in regards to the Harris/Walz ticket, most Americans seem infinitely more amicable to it than Biden/Harris. None of that would have been possible without Pelosi.

The ultimate use case for crypto mining: as a front for an illegal grow op.

I wonder if this is a way to get rid of the two greeters at the door.

I feel like it should be noted that the western pressure campaign to get rid of Netanyahu forced him to rely even more on people like Ben Gvir and other Hadreem, which allowed them to extract concessions in regards to expanding the settlements.

Like just from a place of pure competency it was an awful strategy. If Schumer has said something like “Israel has a right to defend itself, but the US refuses to help the IDF so long as they violate court orders and refuse to draft Hadreem” Bibi would have been gone.

I just don’t get the sense that the US State Department has a fundamental understanding of Israeli Politics, or the internal politics of most middle eastern nations. Without that knowledge projecting soft power becomes so much harder.

So one reason that everyone is glossing over is that republicans had a legit primary.

Trump is an extremely well known quantity. Republicans had a large variety of options to replace him. These were real candidates; There were multiple senators and governors who would be considered real candidates in a more traditional election. The entire political spectrum that makes up the republican party was represented.

Given all those options, republicans still chose Trump. They 100 percent knew what they were getting into.

On the other hand the Democratic establishment collectively chose to not challenge Biden. There were exactly three choices: Biden, a no name house member, and a woman most famous for trying to stop a hurricane with spirit energy. The extent of Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline was also hidden from the public to the point where bringing it up would largely get you attacked for being a MAGA republican.

The end result is that a lot of voters feel blindsided and gaslit when it comes to Biden, while Trump is exactly the asshole he portrays himself as.

I watched the debate with friends. We’re all liberals. We were all extremely upset over Biden’s performance. However during one of his more lucid moments, he brought up how Trump cheated on his pregnant wife with a pornstar. As he was talking, Trump grinned and shrugged. Even though what he did was objectively awful, the entire room burst out laughing. I feel like the election kind of has that energy.

Lol why do I ever bother. The only reason people like you ask for sources is so you can nitpick them.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/diversity-was-supposed-to-make-us-rich-not-so-much-39da6a23