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https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/13/politics/israel-iran-antimissile-system-us-troops/index.html

The US will send an advanced anti-missile system — and US troops to operate it — to Israel “to help bolster Israel’s air defenses following Iran’s unprecedented attacks against Israel on April 13 and again on October 1,” the Pentagon said Sunday.

Literally range defensive tools to save civilian lives. We are deploying anti-missile tech to prevent deaths from rockets, and we need to deploy the personnel trained to manage those advanced tools because they are needed now, not 6 months from now when locals can be trained to operate them.

Approximately 100 US troops are deploying to Israel to operate the THAAD battery, according to a US defense official. It is rare for US troops to deploy inside Israel, but this is a typical number of troops to operate the anti-missile defense system.

So which one is it? We want Biden to protect civilians in the region... or maybe not when the civilians being protected are people from Israel. Once again, the Hamas-indoctrinated tiktokers showing their colors.

Also, in case it's getting lost in the fog of BS in this sub: Iran is literally shooting rockets at Israel cities right now. Real war-class rockets that Israel can't stop reliably because their tech is not advanced enough for ballistics of this nature. Where are all the "Biden should protect the civilians" people now?

Trump is a miserable moron with terrible ideas. The only reason he wins is because of his negative campaigning. If he didn't do any negative campaigning, he would have no following whatsoever.

While we are busy demanding to know in detail exactly how Harris plans to solve every issue of this country, Trump is out there flat-out making up statistics and boogeymen, inventing conspiracy theories about birth certificates and sexual climbing in politics, and using hate and racism dog-whistles to rally the worst of us.

I hope those of you that hold Harris to the highest standards will remember what you did when we are living in the Trump sewer you helped elect.

82-page policy plan from Harris, for the naysayers that somehow continue to pretend that the best candidate available to us this election supposedly has no positions

https://kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy-Book-Economic-Opportunity.pdf

The comment section for this type of posts is always such a shit show.

This is essentially saying 2 things:

1 - It's insane that some here seem to think that to remain "independent" of politics you can abstain or vote third party to show your discontent for how slowly the Dems deal with Natenyahu's BS. Your abstain or 3rd party vote does nothing to "move the Dems to the left" when in reality you are removing them from power to give it to Trump, who has already promised to triple down on helping Netanyahu achieve whatever he wants.

The election is happening right now. There's no time and space to negotiate new candidates or parties. It's either the disappointing Dems, or the christo-fascist GOP. The time for standing on principle was 3 years ago, or next year at the start of the new cycle. Today is about pragmatism - how close we can get to the desired outcome, and which of these parties is more interested in listening to your position moving forward. It should be abundantly clear that Harris is by a huge margin the better choice for your desired outcomes.

2 - The Israel operation in Gaza, that we all want to stop, is not something that can be just ended with the click of a button. A bunch of actors in that region are hell bent on killing each other, like when Hamas did genocide on Israel last year, and now we have multiple state actors moving armies against each other. The brain-dead premise that somehow Democrats "want genocide" makes it impossible to have a serious conversation.

If you don't vote for Harris over a mess in the Middle East that we didn't directly create and are not directly responsible for, and that the Biden administration is trying to solve even if it's too slow for your taste; and instead you act in favor of helping Trump who will absolutely empower Netanyahu to do whatever he wants, then not only are you directly voting against your own interests, but you are engaging in a level of dumb-fuckery of supreme proportions. And fucking all of us over hard while at it.

In short: By opposing Harris right at the finish line of the election cycle, you are going to inflict Trump's dictator regime and the runaway christo-fascist GOP on the entire planet, because you are dissatisfied with how mediocre Dems have been at trying to stop Israel. You think this makes you virtuous. It does not.

Amazing.

90% of my comment was to explicitly say what Democrats do. And you managed to single out the 10% that wasn't about Democrats.

Why stop there? Throw in some "both sides" stuff too.

There are policy details on her website: https://kamalaharris.com/issues/

But it's pretty simple overall. She's not a maverick, what's on offer is simply the Dem agenda with a younger change of guard. The Dems believe in running the economy from the middle class, because investing in people is how we achieve long-term economic success and improve quality of life. So all her policies are going to be the same they would have been for Obama or Biden: improve social protections, improve access to education, improve access to housing, lower costs of living, make the corporations and wealthy pay their fair shares, pull away from needless wars, strengthen international relationships and create trade agreements of mutual benefit.

She can talk policy until she's blue in the face, but we all should already know exactly what we are getting when we vote for a Democrat. The last time this country had a balanced budget it was Democrat. When we raise the minimum wage, it's a Democrat. When we try to make education more affordable or help those with student debt, it's a Democrat. When we strengthen unions and increase taxes on corporations, it's a Democrat. When we pull out of wars, when we increase social services, when we increase protections for minorities, when we secure our clean water and block chemicals and pesticides in our food and household products, when we raise fuel efficiency standards and make corporations pay for pollution, it's a Democrat.

It baffles me that we have to talk about this stuff like it's new. It's simple and it has been for years:

You want a party that runs the economy like adults, and works for the middle class and the well-being of the people: Democrats.

You want a party that works for the rich and corporations, blows up the budgets recklessly, and thinks the low and middle classes are a resource to be used and drained: Republicans.

While we are on this spicy topic today, someone please remind me, what did Jill Stein do?

https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/09/14/donald-trump-at-wharton-university-of-pennsylvania/

It’s rare for a professor to disparage the intelligence of a student, but according to attorney Frank DiPrima, who was close friends with professor William T. Kelley for 47 years, the prof made an exception for Donald Trump, at least in private. “He must have told me that 100 times over the course of 30 years,” says DiPrima, who has been practicing law since 1963 and has served as in-house counsel for entities including the Federal Trade Commission and Playboy Enterprises. “I remember the inflection of his voice when he said it: ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!’” He would say that [Trump] came to Wharton thinking he already knew everything, that he was arrogant and he wasn’t there to learn.”

Trump is an imbecile that can barely string sentences together, so what he says needs to be translated for the rest of us.

In that particular instance, what he was trying to say with his limited ability to communicate, is that he believes that Kamala had tried to distance herself from her black heritage when she thought it was politically convenient in the past. But then she decided to reclaim her black heritage when she felt it could help her politically once again. He is accusing her of playing racial identity politics with her own racial background.

The "put out" in that statement was him trying to say that Kamala herself issued political messaging to distance herself from her black heritage. He was saying that Kamala herself "put that messaging out." So that moment in the debate wasn't about slut shaming, it was about racial politics shaming.

I'm pretty sure she's answered the question every single time. She starts framing the question about how she intended to anchor her economics on boosting the middle class. She starts repeating the thing about being middle class, for the people listening that are slow and need to have things repeated and simplified.

Clearly, even her trying her best to make it simple for the simpletons wasn't enough, when some of them think she's not answering the questions. The same people then turn around and say the guy that speaks about sharks and batteries and rambles about crowd sizes and hating immigrants is for sure an economics genius that always answers the questions. What a time to be alive.

This is true, but it's also incredibly dumb. Like teens that choose to hang out with local drug gangs and throw their future away. You can see why it happens, but it's so wasteful and stupid, and always ends in misery.

What we are ultimately talking about is the depth of stupidity that people are capable of.

Before the flathearthers, Tea Party, Q-anon and the MAGA movements, we simply did not account for just how fucking dumb the average person can be under bad circumstances.

This is the essence of Trump's rise to power. His political advisors called this "an opportunity" and tripled down on it. They believed that a bad-faith movement could build a coalition of the mentally unstable, susceptible morons, cultish religion indoctrinated, under-educated and socially fringed. Easily swept up with Nazi-style messaging and politics.

The solution: At an individual level, if you know someone you seek to save, work to expose them to real information by being a positive and understanding presence in their lives, and slowly showing them the way out of the prison of stupidity inside their own heads.

At a global level, we must exact hard costs on their movement as a whole and each participant as people. We must make it highly expensive and damaging to support fascism. They are already paying the price of being marginalized socially, but costs need to be much higher.

This cost is the reason Trump has not been able to inspire his moron minions to violence in the last couple years. They see that MAGA minions get imprisoned, their lives ruined, and possibly shot in the head, and they simply don't turn up for Trump's calls to violence anymore. The public cost of participation in fascism works as a deterrent, so we need to crank up the costs significantly higher.

If they think they are going to double down on fascism because you called them out, then you must triple down on exacting a price for their bullshit. At some point they'll realize it's not worth it. Just like all these MAGA men on dating apps now pretending to be apolitical because they can't get any women to take them seriously. Suddenly, the pride in their shitty convictions is out the window when they realize they won't be allowed to participate in society. Keep making them pay the price of choosing poorly. The harder you hit them, the faster you help them do some much needed introspection.