Trump says Palestinians have ‘no alternative’ but to leave Gaza

Yeah, why does that comment have so many upvotes? Huh. Weird.

I think you mean "how did it work for us?".

You have to live in this world too. Every person who decided they'd rather let Trump win than vote for Harris still has to inhabit this world and has to watch the shit they ushered into it. Americans who decided they care more about making a point than about the actual material results of the election have that blood on their hands just like the actual Trump voters do.

They just didn't want to vote. It was low hanging fruit to glob on to.

Read that list of executive orders and tell me again how the Democrats are just like the Republicans.

Why should you be forced to pick one? This isn't some game design decision by the developers of your favorite MMO. You're forced to pick one because you don't have the spine to do anything else that can get results.

Are you out there being the change in the Democratic party? Are you out there forcing change with your actions? Are you actually doing something to have a choice between something other than two parties?

Or are you just passively sitting back and complaining that nobody gave you the choice you'd rather make? The level of helplessness in the decision to just let everyone around you suffer because you don't like the choices that your utter passivity has presented you with is absolutely wild.

This isn't a game. This isn't a boycott. This is our planet, our species, and our lives. Real people, likely including yourself, will suffer because you refuse to do anything but wait for someone to come hand you a warm bottle of milk that you won't turn your nose up at. But you'd rather starve and scream and then say "look what you did by failing to give me the choice I would rather have had."

Y'all need to wake up.

I mean, that's the conversation we need to be having as a country. Not to toot my own horn, but I warned about this in a column at the turn of the century that became known as my "Spam and kumquats" piece, arguing that if those are the only two things in the store, you'll eventually think one is your favourite food.

On one hand, you're not wrong.

On the other, getting a combo of "Congress + Senate + Supreme Court + Administration" controlled by the same people who walk around with Nazi flags, make Nazi salutes, call people "sub-human", plan mass deportations... kind of goes beyond "shitty corporate evil".

Who needs to be a political mastermind?

I remember when it was a foregone conclusion that Nazis were pieces of shit and their ideology deserved no quarter.

I explicitly learned this in fucking elementary school.

It takes half a brain cell to look at your options and know the one is far worse for anything you support than another. It takes two brain cells to know politicians are held to their financial benefactors.

I mean, I've been homeless for nearly a year and a half and saw this coming. You don't have to be some political savant.

"No, this pair of shoes must be better, it's from that brand I like! I know it's made of cardboard and duct tape, but I swear, it's from that brand I like, so it has to be better!"

They're supposed to represent us. Not the other way around.

Now you see the problem here is I never expected better shoes, I knew damn well no one would give them to me. I also despise the insinuation that the democrats provided protection of any kind

My apologies, that wasn't a quote it was meant to imply sarcasm. I was saying failed the party in a facetious sense because I don't believe anyone actually failed them.

I don't think many people actually thought Trump would be an improvement, aside from the Christian nationalists.

When your life is misery, a chance, any chance, no matter how small, can often be or at least seem worth it. Rents are through the roof, pay is stagnant, health insurance is complete scam, and people have lost any hope of improving their lives. For tens of millions of people, the probability of them ever actually improving their lot in life is next to zero.

Someone comes along and says, "I'll smash the current order to pieces and reshuffle the entire deck."

Imagine you're a person in desperate straits. You think that overall, that potential leader will be a net negative society. But in the current system, the probability of anything improving in your life is zero. With a complete shuffling of the societal deck, well your odds aren't great, but they are non-zero. You're not going to end up an oligarch, but maybe you'll be one of the minority that ends up slightly better off. After all, some ordinary German citizens did actually materially benefit from the Nazis. Most didn't, but some got lucky.

This is why many people aside from Christian nationalists voted for Trump. The saw him as someone would would come along and knock over the Jenga tower of the existing sociopolitical order. They knew that the odds of their life being directly improved by this were slim. But they thought a slim chance was still there. And if nothing else, it would punish the bastards who have been keeping them down for years.

This is the fatal flaw with milquetoast Democratic centrism. It ignores that if you go long enough without actually helping millions of people who really need help, eventually those desperate people will vote to burn it all down out of sheer spite.

Is such a vote rational? No. But human beings are not rational. Human beings are not perfect utilitarian optimization engines. They vote with their hearts and souls, with both hope and rage. And that is what Democrats have repeatedly failed to realize.

I just find it almost comical that anyone thought Trump would be an improvement if not for the drastic outcomes we’re going to see.

OK...just to make sure I understand you correctly - the people you're mad at, are people who either voted for Trump, or didn't vote at all, because of their opinions about Biden's response to the genocide in Gaza.

if that's accurate, two questions:

a) what is your estimate for the size of that group of people?

b) how many actual individual people in that group can you identify by name? how many do you know personally? (vs having read a news story quoting them)