American exceptionalism was already cringe enough, but now they’re trying to extrapolate their own politics to everywhere else in the world? Holy shit they’re hopeless.

And that’s happened after East Germany was consistently fucked over ever since the reunification, leaving a chunk of the country extremely skeptical of mainstream political parties. Would there be people who would still be racist if East Germany had been treated fairly? Some would be, but it wouldn’t define the vote of most of them.

Ok, I’ll open another thread, then.

REMOVED, DUPLICATE.

The fact that we keep seeing these kinds of news (including the report that “he’s at his best from 10AM to 4PM”) means it’s highly likely that there’s people with high positions in the Democratic hierarchy who think they should switch their candidate (in opposition to whoever is calling the shots), and they’re trying to rock the boat earlier rather than latter by leaking these headlines so that the second option actually has a chance to build their candidacy.

If you think they shouldn’t, I ask you: do you prefer this to be published now, in a controlled demolition by people who want someone other than Biden, or weeks before the election, by people trying to make Trump win?

So you’re now posting images of people being mocked for having mental illnesses. Yeah, sure dude, you’re an exemplary pillar of morality. Perhaps hold on from having these discussions until you grow up.

A donkey will keep on banging its head against the wall no matter how may warnings you give it, huh?

My whole argument is: “We have been doing surgeries on kids without their consent just because society wanted them to conform. If you’re against trans teens receiving surgery after they ask for it after ignoring non consensual surgeries on intersex babies, you probably don’t actually care about the well-being of children, but rather, have a bias against what you don’t consider to be normal”. Instead, you failed to understand what kind of argument I was even making and assumed you had a fight to pick. Again: work on your reading comprehension.

We may be talking about someone who handled logistics, or cooking, or maintenance; they might have been punished by life enough in the 30 years have followed; they may be someone who didn’t know what they were getting into, but once they were on the ground, tried to minimize the harm they brought upon others; they may be someone who realized what the army was doing was wrong too late, and was branded a traitor for refusing orders or revealing evil shit that was going on behind the curtains.

All in all, you’re either defending that once a person does one bad thing, regardless of their context, they have become essentially tarnished forever, and no matter their growth or already suffered punishment they should continue to suffer forever; or else you’re just rationalizing the fact that you want to throw fireworks no matter the harm you bring upon others. Think about this all for two minutes before you say something stupid.

If you join the army because you’re fucking stupid in your 20s, and by your 50s you’ve become a wise, anti-war person who still has PTSD, you don’t deserve to get your PTSD triggered because you were dumb 30 years ago.

If you have any kind of anxiety disorder, sensory hypersensitivity or heart issues, the sudden noise of fireworks will at least startle you. The constant barrage of noise that takes place in some places through some celebrations or through the year provoke people to develop even more serious health issues. Ah, but don’t you dare to suggest that the health of vulnerable people should take priority over some brief dumbfuck fun, or that there exist less harmful ways to celebrate, or that constant fireworks in places with certain population density means annoying a lot of people for the sake of very few, because then it turns out that you just “hate freedom”.

Project 2025 already involved implicit violence even if people didn’t challenge it. So thanks for taking the mask even further off, I guess?

Please work on your reading comprehension.

and is doing it likely as someone who is horribly misguided, or intentionally to try and sway our elections by a foreign entity

And once again we come back to the liberal conspiracy theory of “We’re the only adults in the room, and anyone who disagrees with us is co-opted by foreign powers”. The worst part of it all is the shamelessness of pulling this bullshit when so much people knows you’re talking out of your ass. Fuck off.

Any bets on how long until he makes it to Qatar?

The fact that the US protects their officials and soldiers from the weight of other countries’ law is disgraceful. Unfortunately, it will not change until its allies begin threatening them with kicking their bases out.

If someone being consistent with Labour’s values is too divisive to lead Labour, there can’t be Labour at all. I disagree with some of his stances, but what this man suffered wasn’t internal opposition, it was political assassination.

You know that a lot of cis people do defend trans rights, correct?

My point is that plenty of high-information Democrat voters ultimately fall in line, but the party fails to reach further beyond, while Republicans don’t actually have to “fall in line”, because they like what they’re voting for. Is this not the opposite of the quote?

On top of that, it’s an issue that will easily change the leanings of a lot of low-information voters. Republicans know that the 2025 agenda isn’t popular with moderates, and while most of Biden’s policies have been short-reaching, they’re generally considered a positive (save for Gaza), so they attack at the very obvious and glaring weak point that isn’t actually policy-related.

I actually disagree with this sentiment.

There’s clearly a split in the Democratic Party regarding the candidates and leanings of the old guard, vs a very large portion of their voter base that wants structural reforms in the country (universal public healthcare VS increased access to insurance, for instance), and I bet a large portion of the latter feel whipped into having to vote for a lesser evil rather than for a political project they actually have passion for.

Meanwhile, Trump was an outsider of the Republican party who managed to get their voters in love with him, to the point that he managed to hijack the party and leave it ripe open for a transformation from neoconservative to proto-fascist, despite the Republican old guard initially being hostile towards him.

The Republican party has managed to stay competitive, despite their political goals being less popular overall in the US than the Dems’, precisely because they allowed themselves to mutate and stay responsive to the changes in the electorate, the obvious tragedy being that democratic institutions (mostly referring to both political parties) have been far more willing to incorporate far right nutjobs who want to end democracy than they have for left-wing populism that wants to make housing affordable.

Not that I’ve thought a lot about this specific issue, but I just want to mention that intersex babies have been receiving surgeries for decades in order to make them conform to the majority, far before they were capable of having or expressing any opinion on the matter. So I’m going to be really skeptical of people who oppose trans teens requesting surgery when they themselves have been asking for it, and they have the support of their doctors, as it just looks like the fact that they’re straying away from normativity makes a lot of people apply an unfair double standard.