I wonder if a big part of the reason is just the whole phone call about Biden and subsequent impeachment, and how Zelenskyy wouldn’t play ball and the whole thing damaged Trump’s ego in a big way. So even if it’s politically advantageous in every way to say you want Ukraine to win, Trump is incapable of doing so.

She skipped Netanyahu’s speech in protest and called for an end to the war afterwards.

“The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent,” Harris said.

The reports [from Israeli media] appear to reflect worries among Netanyahu’s inner circle that the emergence of Harris as the presumptive Democrat presidential candidate might herald a tougher US line on the conduct of Israel’s war with Hamas.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/politics/harris-netanyahu-israel-hamas-ceasefire/index.html?cid=ios_app

I’m not in any way arguing that she’s doing everything right on this issue. I think she should go more strongly, although I can also acknowledge that someone at this level is walking a tightrope.

However, if anything, her choice to skip the speech in protest associates her with the protest going on outside, and so she went out of her way to separate herself from the actions at the protest that went too far.

You can argue over whether or not some protesters did go too far, or what else she could say and do that would actually help and be effective, I’m just asking for people to strive for accuracy when making claims. This is an important election, in which I genuinely believe that Harris winning the election will lead to a better outcome for Palestinians than any other outcome. I want to be vigilant about what she says but I also don’t want to look for some excuse to paint her with the same brush as everyone else and write her off.

I wasn’t in anyway even trying to imply that these actions weren’t carried out by protesters. That wasn’t the point I was making. Can’t you see the difference between “I think it was wrong to do XYZ at the protest” and “I don’t think there should be a protest”?

I just watched the video and it didn’t say she denounced the protesters, it said she was one of the officials who strongly condemned the graffiti, flag burning, and raising the Palestinian flag. Specifically those actions. Not the protesters themselves or the fact that they were protesting at all.

If your statement was based on that segment alone, then I would say you mischaracterized the situation in a way that makes Harris come off worse.

Source?

While I agree that it would certainly be ideal if a speed limiter could account for the context that the car is in, you’ve missed a lot in drawing your conclusion that it would be useless without being able to do that.

Hitting a pedestrian is not the only type of accident. If you rear end a car going 25 mph at 70mph it is not a guaranteed death sentence for all. Especially if the driver brakes, which some do not, but some will. And this is ignoring cases where there isn’t a tremendous mismatch in speed. Like, even if it reduced residential deaths by 0% but it reduced overall deaths looking at all situations, it would be a net gain with literally nothing lost. We are looking at the aggregate here. So, it isn’t relevant if you think of one specific situation where you believe 70mph isn’t better than 90mph or whatever number.

Reaction time and braking distance are affected by speed. In some cases, the person going 70 might be able to slow down enough to have the collision be non-fatal. Reaction time goes down and braking distance goes up as speed increases. If a speed limiter gives just enough time to occasionally make an accident non-fatal, then in the aggregate you have fewer fatal accidents.

In fact, taking braking distance into account, I don’t think you can even say that over the millions of miles driven, that a speed maxed at 70mph isn’t going to, occasionally, lead to a situation in a residential area where someone was able to just get out of the way in time because the car covered 30% less distance between the time the pedestrian reacted and the time the car reached that spot (or an even larger difference if the driver noticed and braked at some point as well). But again, it doesn’t matter if it’s few to none in this specific scenario, because a speed limiter of 70 will certainly reduce fatalities overall.

You can certainly kill someone going the maximum legal speed in a place where the speed limit is much lower. But the likelihood of injury and death still does increase with the increase in speed. So if, say, 5% of accidents involving someone going 70 are fatal, but 10% if the person is going 90 (these are made-up numbers), then if cars are not even able to go above 70, you end up saving lives.

What, you’ve never heard of a taste test?

You’re saying “vote for my guy or else” and then acting like it’s my fault hostage takers are going to execute me.

I did not say who to vote for or even that you should vote. I only made the point that it’s the people’s responsibility to educate themselves on what is possible and the best course of action. (Then when you said you hated the country I asked if that includes the people.)

But also, that’s complicated by the fact that America is a blight on the world. The world would literally be better off if this shit hole declines because it can’t fuck with everyone else in the world anymore.

This is embarrassingly naive. Do you think if the US gets turned upside down — aside from the people living there who don’t deserve to suffer — do you think that the US is going to just tuck away in a corner and the world will be a better place? It would take decades and an incredible amount of suffering before you’d have a US that could not fuck with anyone anymore. If you want to see a former superpower in decline, just take a look at Russia. The more they decline, the more they lash out. The more Putin consolidates power, the more suffering that is caused by the whims of a desperate madman.

You’re deluding yourself because you desperately don’t want the options you see ahead of you to be the only options. I don’t like the options either. But there’s no magical way to have the US get better fast or go away fast.

You make whatever choice you want. But at least try to be rational about it.

It’s called living in a society, my dude

Does that hatred include all the people who are affected by the consequences of our elections?

If the person who is better for the country loses then it is all of our faults. In a democracy it’s up to the citizens to know the candidates, understand the system and what people can and can’t do, understand how the election system works, and be aware of what the stakes are.

Political campaigns attempt to hold your hand and pull you in a certain direction because it’s in their best interest to do so, but the blame for what happens in January 2025 rests with all of us.

I’m no fan of organized religion at all but:

“None of you has faith until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”

Sounds pretty similarly chill to me.

The problem is that these texts have so many contradictory statements that they can be used to justify anything anyway.

“I don’t really like X, but as long as they don’t then do Y I guess it’s okay”

They always do Y

It’s not a weird caste system. It’s just that people have always primarily just used SMS in the US, and if the people texting all happen to have iPhones, then there are some extra features tacked on (from the perception of the end user). Having been in many many large group chats for various activities and events, where it’s never 100% apple and just SMS, absolutely nobody cares at all. It’s just that maybe some teens and tweens use the colors to judge and exclude, which they famously find justifications for doing in every generation, and probably even that is overblown by the media.

There simply was never an incentive to kind of force everybody to move over to e.g. WhatsApp, and people don’t bother to do something like that en masse without a need to.

I don’t know. When I actually observe what people on the left say, they offer a path and don’t just rail against the right. It just doesn’t make headlines.

And you can say that means they need to do better at controlling the narrative, but I think the problem is that negative stuff has an inherent advantage when it comes to making headlines. So when the right does their outrageous negative shit: automatic headlines. When the left offers hope and reason: crickets.

Doesn’t mean the left can shrug their shoulders and not strive for better, but they are at an inherent disadvantage because of the nature of our society. (And if you want to say this is largely the fault of capitalism out of control then you’d get no argument from me.)

Also if he ran in the very next election, he’d be 66 at his inauguration. Not exactly achieving our goal of injecting some youth into the presidency!

Yes, it’s clear as day that he’s trying to illustrate that Trump isn’t interested in actually solving problems. And if he actually takes the bait and does it, it would basically force the GOP’s hand in Congress to pass a bill.

If this were my grandma, then sure, I wouldn’t fault her. But if it’s someone making life-altering decisions based on their understanding of it, someone who has been doing so for a very long time, and who has support staff who ostensibly try to make sure that person understands the topic at hand, and yet after all these years of hearing about tech-related topics and deciding on them, the person — who has every ability to retire if the world is moving too fast for them to keep up, but has opted not to — asks a question as absurd as this… I actually am going to fault that person.