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Cake day: April 30th, 2024

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  • And that criticism was always bullshit. There’s no “right” way to retreat, it was always going to play out the way it did. Journalists criticized it in bad faith, because it generated clicks and because they never actually opposed the war, because again, war is great for clicks. In reality, what happened when the US pulled out was the culmination of 20 years spent doing nothing to stabilize the country and only making the Taliban stronger.

    But go ahead then, armchair strategist, and describe to me what specifically could’ve been done differently about the withdrawal that would not have resulted in things playing out the way they did.

    Opposing the withdrawal is the same as supporting the war. The withdrawal was one of the only good things Biden did in his whole career and liberals will never forgive him for it. Worse yet, you want to allow Trump to claim credit for it when Biden’s the one who actually saw it through and had to deal with the flak from it.





  • People are freaking out that the president can legally kill people now but that was essentially already the case, de facto. Obama did it via drone strikes, for example, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was involved with the Taliban but never given due process, and later his 16 year old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was never even accused of terrorism - both American citizens. Of course, Bush also set up a completely illegal system of detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay, which also included American citizens and which continued long after his term. There was also of course the illegal mass surveillance program that began under Bush and continued through Obama, Trump, and Biden, with the only legal action being against the person who exposed the crime.

    In all of those cases, the Justice department simply chose not to investigate or press charges, as is within their power to do. If the president straight up shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, it would be up to the Justice department to decide whether or not to prosecute, and if they say no, that’s that (though it would also be possible for congress to act via the impeachment process, which would require a majority of the house and 2/3 of the senate to be on board).

    This ruling doesn’t give the president a blank check, but rather, it gives the court an easy legal argument to give the president a pass on any case they hear. The court can still rule that something wasn’t an official act. Practically speaking, before they still could have still found the president innocent for whatever bullshit reason they could come up with, but they’re now saying that they don’t even have to pretend to have a reason.

    Of course, if the president wanted to start killing Supreme Court justices or other political opponents, a piece of paper was never going to be the thing that stopped that. Whether the president can order the military to gun down congress is just a question of whether the military decides to listen to them and whether anyone manages to stop them. It was always the case that if you can kill anyone who could find you guilty, you can do whatever you want. On the other side of that, even if the ruling did authorize the president to kill all of his political opponents on some technicality, he would still face the same obstacles if he tried to do it.

    What the law says only matters insofar as it can be enforced, and ultimately laws represent threats made by the powerful towards the rest of us, and among the powerful the way of settling disputes is power, with legal power being but one of many forms that can take.



  • Amazing. So because the NRA met with Russian weapon manufacturers to try to get rich, it means every one of the 5.5 million NRA members has been swayed by Russian propaganda. Absolutely zero of them were legitimately just gun nuts who were always going to vote Republican because they oppose gun control, 100% of the members were swayed by Russia the moment someone on the board met with a Russian arms dealer.

    I guess it becomes very easy to show that a large number of Americans have been influenced by Russia if you’re allowed to play like 6 degrees of separation like that. Why don’t we count anyone who ever used Facebook too, while we’re at it? What percentage of Americans bought a coke in 2020, while Coca-Cola was doing business in Russia? This goes way deeper than I ever imagined.


  • I’m glad that the US has suddenly started caring about labor rights and the well-being of Muslims, and I’m sure that it’s just pure coincidence that it happens to be aligned with criticizing and fear-mongering it’s largest competitor.

    There are plenty of poor countries with worse conditions than China. Major multinational corporations set up shell corporations to run their sweatshops and if they get exposed they say, “We had no idea,” maybe pay a tiny fine, then set up another company to do the exact same thing. Many of these countries are in the US’s sphere of influence, and many have to sign away control of their own domestic policies as a condition for entry into the global marketplace, while their resources, stolen by force by colonizers, remain in foreign hands.

    Why isn’t the US concerned about their labor conditions? I’ll tell you why: because one of those cases means giving more money to rich corporations in the form of defense contracts, and the other means restricting the ability of rich corporations to exploit the poor. All the bombs the US is building will do nothing to improve the conditions of anyone living in China, while there are plenty of people who the US could be lifting out of poverty if it cared to.

    The sudden decline in relations was not because the whole US just woke up one day and decided to start caring about the conditions of laborers in China, which used to be much worse than today. Don’t feed me that nonsense.





  • That’s wild. Like, to think all it takes is a handful of Twitter bots to instantly sway like half the population of a country.

    Say, why doesn’t anyone else try this? Just set up some bot accounts to spread misinformation in favor of Biden, and it should be just as effective right? I mean, it can’t be that people have different beliefs and different material interests or anything like that. Everyone who disagrees with you is simply so stupid that they just instantly believe anything they see. Shouldn’t you be able to use that to your advantage?





  • OBJECTION!@lemmy.mltoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldUseful idiot
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    2 days ago

    Biden and Trump are sitting within 1.5% in polls right now, it’s neck and neck.

    Those numbers are from polls taken before the debate. According to leaked internal polls, Biden is down in Pennsylvania (which is the tipping point state) by 7.3%, following what was the worst week of the campaign. Once new polls come out, we’ll get a clearer picture of how much further behind he is than he was before.




  • OBJECTION!@lemmy.mltoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldUseful idiot
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    3 days ago

    But I can’t help but notice the anti-Biden “left” shifted hard from Genocide Joe to Bad debate Performance without skipping a beat or looking back.

    How are people using this like it’s some kind of own? A person can be bad for two reasons lol, he’s still Genocide Joe and he’s also senile.

    Also accellerationism is dumb.