I’m pretty sure the both sides take is being lifted directly from the US politics shit show and is probably an early fall back position to diffuse argument and lessen culpability in the aftermath of war crimes. I’m with you though, there’s a lot of crocks in relatively proximity.

Oh and on Ukraine. No? Well, maybe Alex Jones?

No, I’m a disused blender from a Margaritaville. They let me use the computer in the managers office.

New hot take in the rhetoric war: Both Sides

What a crock of shit.

from the article

And then there is the trauma. When the fighting stops, the cost to children and their communities will be borne out for generations to come. Before this latest escalation, more than 800,000 children in Gaza – three quarters of its entire child population – were identified as needing mental health and psychosocial support. That’s before this latest nightmare.

1,000,000 children are being denied a livable present and future. The clock is ticking. Please call your local representatives.

ACAB, eh?

Thanks for the recommendation. Just downloaded (just in case) and I’ve gotta say, I might like this enough to switch out even if they don’t mess with my browser player.

Maybe a big asteroid will hit the planet soon and we can all just call it a wrap. Almost feels like it would be a small comfort to go out in the style of a 90’s action thriller apocalypse. Apologies for being doomy, but Christ, everyone everywhere just fucking sucks. Thanks for sharing this, I’m not sure I would have let myself believe it existed otherwise.

Went to a new dentist, and the hygienist started out cleaning my teeth saying she doesn’t talk about politics and likes to keep thing lite. 20 minutes later I was being told how socialism is the number one threat to America and how people need to wake up… Scary when people can be that worked up about something they clearly don’t understand. More so when the person they are talking to has a mouth full of dental tools and hasn’t said shit.

LOL, no they don’t? Your rehashed conclusion is:

• “after 2016 all polls are wrong because Hillary lost” K…
• “only elections show the outcome of elections” how is that relevant at all to the main point of opinion manipulation by the media?
• The 2008 part you reference incorrectly because you didn’t understand the context and clearly couldn’t trouble yourself with looking at any of the supporting material I provided.
• Funnily you re-support the conclusion I came to and say that American voters can be easily swayed, despite what might be in their best interests. <—Proving my point

Overall, you’ve wasted both our time and shown that you don’t really want to discuss anything in good faith.

Sweet. That’s a wrap for me.

I believe it to be a fair assessment, and not because of my feelings or desire for change, but simply because I (and apparently some others further up this thread) saw basically the same thing happen.

I’ve worked closely enough to the Dem party/staffers/organizers that I’ve seen the same pandering play out locally, statewide and nationally in much the same way. It’s mainly about playing ball to keep your funding streams up and to fill your little black book for the next cycles war chest. Certainly, some politicians are more genuine than others in the party but for the majority politics comes to be little more than moves to jostle purse strings from PACs, donors and the party itself. At the end of the day there’s endless things that Dems could be doing to fight back against the takeovers of state level governments, school boards, appointee positions and the like, but they aren’t.

We can say “but we’re the one’s who fight the good fight” but there’s no keeping the genie in the bottle on the GOP side and Biden should have pushed his powers to the limit to gain every protection or have the courts limit his and future presidents power as a guardrail.

There certainly is always a narrative around these events, but Sanders was consistently polling as the most well liked politician in America for years around that time. There’s no conspiracy around the ways that coverage began slanting as standings solidified, and every other contender in the race threw their support behind Biden (including Warren, which left everyone scratching their head.) Here’s another article about MSNBC. If your actually interested that one has all of the measured instances laid out in google docs you can look at. I don’t know any people alleging that the votes were manipulated in terms of ballot stuffing or anything, so if you mean that by conspiracy then I’d have to agree with you there.

Your assessment of political leanings in America also seems to be very skewed and there’s a graph there that shows Dem/left sentiment at its highest point since 2008 during those primaries. Although it does seem to be ticking back conservative, but when Joe Biden still chooses to punch left on dem socialists after a failed insurrection that’s not much of a surprise.

Honestly I think it’s all the neo-liberal echos of Reagan. Something broke in the minds of Dem strategists and politicians when he so handily swept the entire country. For them it was a sign that the waters were rich if they could just wiggle a little more to the right economically and shake off the remaining vestigial support of Keynesian economics. Once both parties saw that you could feast on the corpse of America for decades without having to deliver anything outside of photo ops and being likable that was it.

Maybe it’s all just that thing where people look back on George Bush and say they’d want to have a beer with him. It’s identity politics and we’re made to look through a prism at these people and see how our personalities would intertwine with theirs. I think we need to find a way to start trusting the boring and awkward candidates, or forcing our boring awkward friends to run for office. We need politicians who are visibly uncomfortable speaking at a podium.

You’re right. The cereal can only be “Oops, all berries” so many times before you know that machine was built to only make berries and lie about it.

It’s funny how we all forget that JB ran as a “place holder” candidate to begin with and said he had no desire or intention to run for a second term. The thought was that by now one of the other primary candidates (Klobachar, Harris and Buttigieg) would have gotten tapped and run on Biden’s behest. There was clearly a king maker deal cut so that they would all drop out and throw their support behind him to cut off Sanders momentum. They combined this with a media “bombshell” that Clyburn backed Biden over Sanders, after telegraphing support for Sanders previously. This combination of factors was snowballed into a media blitz that never let up and pushed Biden to the top seemingly by just repeating itself ad nauseam.

Still though, the tap for the next in line never came and the old guard stays in place again just by merely having a pulse. Dems have once again squandered full control and couldn’t cobble together any protections from a clear and present danger in radicalized right political zealots. We could all argue about the spoilers and that we couldn’t re-do the filibuster but I’m sure a couple million could have been back channeled to make that happen. They didn’t want it to.

At the knifes edge is exactly where they want us to be and they will take full fascism over even moderate movement toward actual implemented progressive policy. Now they will tell you up and down that they want things like student loan forgiveness or clean energy policy with teeth, but they will never implement it in a way that ensures it’s survival. It’s just platitudes that are built to fail and “vote for us harder and we’ll get it done next time.”

I’m so tired of this political system where we’ve been held hostage for the better part of 2 decades. All the while our hopes for a meaningful America just slips further by and we’re powerless to stop it. The only option we’re presented is to press a pause button for 4 years so that we can have permission to feel ok until the election starts again in 2 years. I would take a rouge sentient AI resting control of the country and threatening our nuclear destruction, unless we do as were told, over this. At least then it would probably make at least some meaningful strides to correcting the course of our nihilistic self destruction.

If one of them gets hurt then I think we’ll all be the real winners. I hope something inside of Zuckerberg snaps and he does some weird 2 finger, forbidden heart bursting strike on Elon. He paid a man 1 million dollars to teach him that move, under the promise he’d never use it… But just like all bourgeoisie tech bros, he lied.

He sold the show/brand to cbs/viacom for an “undisclosed amount” after making 8 episodes total. Dude got a bag.

Remember when CIA spokesman John (Jim from the Office) Kranski, made a whole good feels news network when the pandemic started and then turned around and sold it for a shit ton of cash? Pepperidge farm remembers.