banner80

That sums it up well. Leia wasn't unclear about her morals and goals. She was working in government with the intention of making things better, instead of sitting outside of government and bitching while doing nothing to help.

The baddies were sick of her constant efforts to derail their plans, so once they had enough fascist power to start going after their political rivals, they went after her.

Being in government does not make everyone automatically a willing participant of all of that government's policies. You wouldn't accuse Bernie or AOC of being cozy with GOP bullshit. But people around here are very happy to blame Harris for everything they perceive to be going wrong in the gov, while casually dismissing that Trump is 10X worse at the same topics.

RE: Immigrants

Trump & Co are not making this argument in good faith. They don't actually believe that immigrants are taking the jobs and houses, and their insane proposed solution is not actually intended to make anything better. Trump is a fascist trying to win power through demagoguery, and their focus is to find pain points of negative feelings they can amplify to turn people angry and create division.

A big part of this is "othering," finding someone they can turn into the bad guys so they have someone to beat up and blame for all our problems. The Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the blacks, the Muslims the Mexicans. It doesn't matter who, as long as they can find a way to tap into hate and bigotry, and funnel that into a shared anger towards anyone. Any group that is "foreign" and new can and has been the "other" we hate.

In the real world, a solution to housing shortage is as simple as it would be without immigrants. Populations have been growing for centuries, and we simply build more and upwards to provide housing for everyone. Since people are working, their productivity allows them to pay for their housing. This is not particularly complicated. When population growth happens fast, we simply need to manage this process more intently.

We are currently in a weird situation because of population shifts, increase in costs of housing (like variability in lumber costs and high interest rates), and the weird period of excess wealth that we were left in due to the pandemic economic chaos.

The real solution is by no means simply finding an "other" group to blame, hate, and throw into the ocean. The real solution is to put more effort to advance our housing development slightly faster than it would do so normally under regular population growth.

What Harris is doing makes simple sense. She proposes to give incentives to house builders to build more, and to give incentives to families to be able to buy more easily than corporations. There's more than can be done, but this approach is economics-sound and will definitely work well enough while other optimizations are pursued.

Trump's idea of removing 10 million immigrants is not only deeply imbecilic, it's also designed as a catastrophe on the economy, and it's suicidal. You can't shift large segments of the population without an economic impact. Immigrants of all walks of life are part of the economy, contribute to productivity and pay taxes. In various sectors they are a key source of labor supply where we would otherwise not have enough people to perform jobs. It is estimated that there are about 5 million undocumented immigrants GROWING OUR FOOD in the US. If your plan is to kill Americans by famine, kicking out the people that grow and make the food will work a treat.

I also have thoughts on how to slow down corporate ownership of housing, but there's no need to get into that since this post is already long. Harris already has the right direction by putting strong economic incentives on the things that we want to see more of. And that's a starting path towards even more improvements in the near future. But it requires having people with functioning brains and good ideas in gov.

Here is the main problem summed up:

Political strategists on the right wing figured out that it's easier to gain power by making people angry and hateful than it is by doing great policy and giving people hope. Angry and hateful people mobilize easier and can be hardened to vote AGAINST an enemy instead of having to earn their vote by merit.

Armed with this strategy, media networks like Fox "News" have spent nearly 3 decades making millions of Americans angry, hateful and disinformed about proper governance and progressive efforts. By painting progress itself as danger, and every sensible politician as a monster, they are able to mobilize voters for the GOP and against everyone else, even when the GOP offers nothing in return by the way of good governance.

At this point, the average US disinformation-hardened conservative does think "absolutely not" about any mainstream modern idea for governing correctly and doing the right thing by citizens. Because they've been conditioned to think that any type of good governance that prioritizes society is some type of evil, crafted by monsters that must be defeated. And they currently believe that such evil must be defeated by giving dictator powers to a criminal, rapist, treasonous, idiot, demented conman.

We have many problems in this country, but the main one is malicious disinformation by right wing propaganda that has infected the culture and ruined the brains of tens of millions of Americans. And we are doing nothing to stop those disinformation propaganda networks, or even slow them down, under the misguided notion that "free speech" gives everyone a right to lie/con/defraud everyone else.

Another article said that the McD headquarters doesn't hire felons, but the franchises can do whatever they want and some don't do background checks.

I was stuck at imagining Trump going through an interview as a manager. Imagine when they ask him what he would do in situations with diverse hires, or how to make schedules without favoritism, his views on maintaining food safety and standards, how he plans to handle difficult customers. The rants would be epic. If you let him speak he'll talk himself out of a job in the first 3 minutes.

Trump is not qualified to hold any job whatsoever in the American business landscape. He has no skills for any technical work, he would be terrible working a service job, and he is absolutely horrendous at business with his reliable track record of failures, bankruptcies and grifts.

The only job he is qualified for appears to be conman politician for the GOP, where the standards are so low that nobody can find the floor.

I don't like this rigged system with only 2 options. I will refuse this system by either abstaining, or voting 3rd party.

If you do that, you get the clown. You don't have any real option at this current moment because the decision is now and there are only 2 options. If you refuse to choose, you get the clown.

I feel like, if we get the clown, it will teach the system a lesson or something. Perhaps then something will change and choices will be more palatable in the future.

If you choose the clown, there's a very high likelihood that there won't be a future for any of us.

I'm going with the clown.

I'm sorry, but you don't understand how any of this works.

The terrorist Hamas organization is embedded in Gaza as the ruling authority. The only way to pry them out is to have fighting where they hide, which is in civilian buildings in Gaza. Hamas does that on purpose, so that the only way to fight them is to bomb Gaza buildings like hospitals. Hamas is trying to get as many of their own people in Gaza killed as possible, so people like you watch their tiktok propaganda and repeat their talking points. There were 4 million people in Gaza at the start of the conflict, and by Hamas' own numbers, there have been about 1% total deaths including Hamas' own warriors. In the US, we lost nearly that many people to Trump's mismanagement of Covid-19.

Iran is bombing Israel with ballistic missiles. They did not issue warnings to civilians like Israel does, or use bombs of limited power like Israel does, or answer to the Western alliance like Israel does.

I know this doesn't match your propaganda worldview, but the US is trying to reduce damage and prevent war in the region. What you call a "genocide" against Hamas-controlled territory is the tip of the iceberg of the damage to civilians that could spread if we let Iran and Israel go at each other with full-scale war, while Hamas continues to attempt to exterminate every Israeli on the planet.

The reason my elected officials like Biden don't listen to your strategy, is that your strategy is paper thin and has no merit. They are busy trying to solve complex multi-actor problems with very serious repercussions, not consuming Hamas propaganda on tiktok.

Misinforming while talking about misinformation. Par for course around these parts.

No casualties from 180 Iran rockets for mainly 2 reason:

1. Israel is used to the bellicose nature of all their murderous neighbors, so they have a strong culture of bomb shelters. 10 million Israel civilians were on bomb shelter alert that day.

2. Israel had help from allies to defend from Iran's rockets.

The US is on record as having shot down rockets that Israel couldn't deal with. This is why we have our warships nearby, to protect civilians. And also why we are sending more anti-missile tech. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyv0ne41pzo

And it is said that Jordan used their tech to shoot down some Iranian rockets to help protect Israel's civilians when they saw the trajectory of the rockets. This wouldn't be a first for Jordan, they had to get involved in April against another Iranian attack https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/17/middleeast/jordan-walks-a-tightrope-after-downing-iranian-drones-and-missiles/index.html

Also, perhaps I missed it, but I did not catch in your comment any relief that Israel civilians were spared horrors thanks to the quick actions of anti-missile efforts. Somebody might mistake your rhetoric for that of the Hamas-indoctrinated fucktards around these parts that speak in Hamas talking points and celebrate terrorism and genocide when the target is Israel.