Compassion >~ Thought

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Joined 3 days ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2024

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  • Months ago was the time to make changes. Yeah, that’s what they said then too, except it was wrong then, as proven by the fact that the changes did happen.

    Even if the words sound similar, now really is different than then. Voting has already begun - the fight to pick candidacies is long over and done. It is now long past time to pick a side.

    If you want to vote 3rd party then go ahead - nobody is stopping you. Aside from all the news about some 3rd-party candidates receiving money from and having demonstrated ties to Russia (look it up if you haven’t heard), the Democrats do not seem to be taking such rhetoric as a credible “threat” though, for whatever reason. Probably bc they really are the best hope for the Palestinian people, as the latter recently confirmed by putting out a statement saying why they finally chose to endorse Kamala Harris’s campaign. You can ofc accuse the Dems of being very naive and disconnected from their voting base - that would be extremely difficult to argue against - and yet facts are facts.

    See e.g. this article: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17919598.



  • How though? And more importantly, why? Like, what “leeway” does Kamala have to say anything different than she already has, which she could shift to?

    Maybe after she wins yes, but at this point the choices are Trump vs. not-Trump, so I don’t see how a vote for a third-party would help in this case. At one point, with Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton there were different thoughts about how a vote for Bernie would cause Hillary to shift more towards the left - but most of that again gets back to the nomination process, not the final show-down between the two parties, and after that was a disastrous example of how voting for the 3rd-party candidate didn’t help the democratic party shift, except in the sense that it handed literally hundreds and hundreds of judicial nominees to the Republican party that, among other things, ended the protections of Roe v. Wade.

    Two months ago the situation with Biden was VERY DIFFERENT than the situation now faced, with Kamala. Back then we could - and yay, did! - shift and pivot to adjust to the harsh realities that he was not capable of running again. We very likely would have lost if he had. But that was then, and this is now.

    Anyway I think that I’m preaching to the converted here, so maybe I just misunderstood something that you said. Tbh, I don’t agree with your take on the OP - I think it really does show voting not for a 3rd party but voting for the other side b/c “bOtH sIdEs ArE tHe SaMe” (the title of the post), specifically wrt genocide. I think that b/c there are only 2 tracks shown… Also, the genocide being mentioned implicitly in the graphic (“but worse…”) shows how its focus is on short-term effects immediately after the election, not long-term ones about telling the Democratic party how the American populace would very much enjoy it if it would become more liberal if they would please and thank you very much.





  • They lived in a different time period. Climate change hadn’t already happened yet, and the USA especially was sitting on top of the world, as the rest of it had been if not quite decimated then at least heavily damaged by all the bombing from WWII. And we were a socialist nation! Schools, roads, bridges, a fully functioning post office, and so much more. The top marginal tax rate was ~90% and… well anyway.

    So yeah, like the Kings of Old, they accumulated “stuff”. It made sense to them at the time. Surely nothing would ever like… “change” or anything like that, would it? And they even okayed the dismantling of things like social security, and maintenance of infrastructure - so long as such did not directly impact themselves, it’s all good, right? So long as women also lose bodily autonomy, anything that went along with that is A-okay, r-r-right?!

    On the bright side, do younger people have less stress, knowing that they don’t have to save up for retirement, bc they’ll surely die sooner than it would be able to keep up with anyway? Especially with inflation like we’ve seen lately?

    Anyway that was quite a tangent wasn’t it? TLDR: people’s lives are so very different now, and look to remain that way permanently. And not just in the USA, but due to Brexit, in the UK too. Disinformation campaigns are strikingly effective.







  • Local health departments are chronically understaffed. For every 6,000 people in rural areas, there’s one public health nurse — who often works part-time, one analysis found.

    “State and local public health departments are decimated resource-wise,” said Lurie, who is now an executive director at an international organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. “You can’t expect them to do the job if you only resource them once there’s a crisis.”

    Another explanation is a lack of urgency because the virus hasn’t severely harmed anyone in the country this year. “If hundreds of workers had died, we’d be more forceful about monitoring workers,” Chessher said. “But a handful of mild symptoms don’t warrant a heavy-handed response.”

    You get what you pay for.


  • I mean… yeah, ofc, but that ship has sailed, and I for one hope that this message gets spread far and wide, to help counteract the message being preached from the literal and actual pulpit in America that a vote for Trump = a vote for God.

    Also, as we could have guessed, this is an enormously clickbaity “news” title, as this excerpt explains:

    “In a moment like this, I am compelled to be clear that every voter must make a choice, and my choice is to oppose the dangerous politics that (Donald) Trump and the MAGA movement have unleashed by supporting the ticket that can defeat this potential for American fascism,” Barber said in a statement to CNN, while stressing that he was backing Harris in his personal capacity.

    In their personal capacity they are endorsing Harris, but in their professional (or whatever that word should be to mean non-personal) capacity they are only endorsing “not-Trump”. As it should be.

    Edit: which reminds me that I wanted to block this community - that issue of EXTREMELY misleading headlines (especially those that mean the precise polar opposite of what a natural interpretation of the sentence would seem to indicate) comes up FAR too often here for my tastes. !globalnews@lemmy.zip significantly cleans up such trash by limiting what is allowed to be shared.







  • Tbf, the Democratic party nomination process is not a 2-party system. They did say that back then, and they were wrong to do so - hoping that people wouldn’t notice that difference.

    But now we are talking about the real deal, the thing that they were trying to falsely tie an equivalence to, the actual vote for the actual presidency. Democracy in the USA may not last the decade regardless, but voting one way is for ditching it in favor of Project 2025 and among other things, ironically enough even moar-er support for genocide, while the other is a vote for hopefully a little better than the current status quo.

    Both offer short term pain and long term destruction… but not equally so.