There was nothing he could have done. It’s a mistake thinking the US changed so dramatically almost overnight in the past few months. In reality, the cracks in the dam have been growing slowly over the decades. There just comes a point where you can’t paper them over anymore.

All the suggestions here about moves Biden could have made to the Supreme Court or with other laws are forgetting about January 6th. There’s a huge number of people who voted for and actually want what is happening right now. Blocking them or delaying them is only delaying the inevitable. Politics is war by other means.

Wouldn’t that only be true if the third party was running a brand new slate of candidates? If the Republicans and Democrats are in secret talks to form a third party, it’s likely that a whole bunch of incumbents plan to break off from their parties to join the third party. They don’t need to win an election to do that, they could do it right now.

Of course their old parties would try to defeat them in the next election, but if these incumbents have been getting elected for many years then they’d still be hard to unseat even in a different party. Especially so if these members’ electorates are already disgruntled with the existing parties.

The lie was that only Palestinians have lived there for thousands of years.

Not according to the state of Israel

Correction: the government of Israel, with a ruling party (Likud, led by Bibi) which has 32/120 seats in the Knesset. That’s less than 27% of the seats. This is what you get with proportional representation and coalition government.

Israelis and Palestinians have lived in the area for centuries and centuries. They’re ethnically the same, brothers and sisters. They differ by culture and the old problem (familiarity breeds contempt). I have maintained all along that both have a right to exist and to self-determination.

But there are people here that now deny these rights to Israelis simply because Israel has a lot of military and political power right now. It’s like for them it’s not enough for Palestine to be free, they must also see Israel destroyed. And in the process they overlook the atrocities committed by Hamas (not to mention what the PLO did in Jordan decades ago).

If you’re just going to lie then you’re not even worth talking to.

A small number did. Vastly more were part of the diaspora.

That’s not true. Only 26% (and shrinking) of Israeli Jews have European ancestry. A plurality, 44% (and the fastest growing) have native Israeli ancestry. The remainder come from North Africa and Asian ancestry but all groups besides Israeli background are shrinking.

Nazis during the Holocaust might have wanted Jews deported to Israel but today’s Nazis want Israel wiped off the map and all Jews destroyed.

You can’t draw a clean ethnic or cultural boundary around Israel that’s separate from their arabic brothers and sisters

Not an ethnic boundary but definitely a cultural one. Judaism is very different from Islam. Palestinian culture is very different from Israeli culture.

That’s what makes the conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism so nefarious.

The conflation happens on both sides of the argument. The two extremes need each other to justify themselves.

I believe both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. The issue is that both claim the same land and neither tolerates the other at this point. It doesn’t help that none of Israel’s neighbours want Palestinian refugees so the crisis is exacerbated to such an extreme.

Nobody contends that the “shared identity” of Israel has no right to exist

That’s where things get tricky. There clearly are people who claim Israel (and Jews in general) as a shared identity and cultural group have no right to exist. These people are traditionally called Nazis.

You’ll also run into trouble talking about historic Palestine, previously part of the Ottoman Empire, and long prior to that the Kingdom of Israel (around 1047-930 BCE). The Israelis aren’t simply a group of Ashkenazi Jews who moved to the Middle East during the Holocaust. They’re a people who have lived in the area for thousands of years and maintained a distinct culture throughout occupation by other empires.

It seems you’re conflating the words nation and state. A nation is a group of people with a shared, named identity, such as Hawaiian or Palestinian. A state is an officially recognized group with sovereignty over an area of land. Many nations exist which do not have their own states.

All nations have the right to exist by the human right to freedom of association. Sovereign states have no right to exist: their existence is asserted and defended by force and by mutual recognition with other sovereign states.

I think you mean private equity, which act as the scavengers of the economy, dismantling companies and selling them off piece by piece. Venture capital is about funding 20 startups and hoping one of them becomes the next Google.

Yes but not Calgary or Edmonton, nor Lake Louise, nor Banff, or any of the other mountain resort towns! Plus we keep the full stretch of the trans Canada highway and all the major railways.

What? No. All our (Canadian) fascists are gonna separate and join the US. Then we’ll be a fascist-free country!

I have seen this exact story a bunch of times. I haven’t bothered to complain. I just chalk it up to a Lemmy thing.

That’s not particular to Americans. Lots of people put their heads down rather than try to fight. Look at Russia!

This phenomenon is called depoliticizaton. Philosopher Vlad Vexler talks about it often.

Reminds me of German chancellor Franz von Papen. He was instrumental in bringing Hitler to power but he never accepted responsibility for it, even though he lived until 1969!

Except Los Angeles. We don’t need that kind of superficiality here!

Exactly. He’s serious about wasting everyone’s time and distracting from his attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure. He’s serious about flattering Trump with delusions of grandeur about a 19th century gilded age of “spheres of influence” so that the US abandons Ukraine.

Putin still has a lot to worry about though. The European sleeping dragon is getting restless.

His cameo in Home Alone 2 was free. He was the owner of the Plaza Hotel at the time and he insisted on the cameo as part of the payment for using the hotel for filming.

The handful of well-intentioned docs are the exception, not the rule.

I wouldn’t be so quick to judge the intentions of doctors who do over-prescribe. Consider this scenario:

You are a doctor. Your patient comes in with severe pain from a herniated disc caused by an injury at work. None of the ordinary painkillers or muscle relaxants you prescribe are working and they keep returning to your office to complain about constant pain. You know that opioids will be extremely effective at reducing or eliminating their pain but you also know that these drugs cause addiction. You explain this to your patient and they are adamant: they are 100% willing to risk becoming a drug addict if it means they can escape their severe chronic pain.

What do you do?

Personally, I find this dilemma so troubling that I would not want to be a doctor because of it. I have other reasons for not taking that career path but even if it were the only reason it would be enough to stop me. I don’t think it’s at all obvious that you can just ignore a patient in severe pain and say “I’m sorry, I won’t prescribe this legal drug which will alleviate your pain.”