I realize, historically, it is customary to refer to the leader of a country as ‘the country’ when it comes to decisions made on behalf of said country. However, in this age of global communication with individuals within said country and all other individuals globally know that not all individuals within a country necessarily agree with ‘the leader’, can we please just use proper names when a leader does something, rather than a general designation? trump violated the terms. Not ‘the people’ of the US.
No. Trump is the President of the US. He decides what US policy is and the US implements it. What I said is accurate.
I didn't say it was incorrect. I only requested acknowledgement that one man doesn't speak for an entire population.
But he does speak for the country, unfortunately. That's his role as president. And a majority of voters wanted him, so Americans can't even say he was forced on them.
He wasn't forced, no, but it was only a majority of people who bothered to vote who chose him. If we factor in the people who were registered yet didn't bother to vote plus the ones who've completely given up on electoralism so never even registered to vote (but could have) in the first place the percentage of the 'Murican population who actually inflicted him on us is definitely a minority. In any event either by omission or commission yeah, we did it to ourselves.
That makes about as much sense as your usual. Of course there are lots of Americans who don't support Trump. I don't need to make that disclaimer in order to criticise US policy. Anyhow the US appear to have compelled a ceasefire now, if that term even means anything in the context of the IDF occupying Southern Lebabon.
Americans are in no position to say "He doesn't represent us". He does. We just don't like to admit it. He was out, and we let him back in. There were too many people that liked him, and too many people who couldn't be bothered to care, to keep him out of office. So America gets what it deserves. And what we deserve is to have our noses constantly rubbed in the pile of shit we made. We all let this happen. I suppose in November we'll see if we learned our lesson. But I'm not holding my breath.
Israeli "Defense" Minister said this: "We have flattened the entire first line of villages in southern Lebanon, all the houses have been destroyed. The residents will never see them standing ever again. The 200,000 Lebanese residents who were in the 'security zone' are never returning again. Not one of them will ever return to southern Lebanon" The Minister of National Security: "For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn." That's just today. These people claim that it's terrorism to kill their invading soldiers.
Hearing rhetoric like this obviously gets Trump's little mushroom semi-rigid, which is why he picked out Pete Hegseth.
Brilliant. Also, he mentions something here which makes me wonder what will happen when a future president does something corrupt. Will they be held accountable, or will people say "meh, not as bad as Trump" and just let it slide?
Nevertheless, it would be a major error to assume that the totality of those who didn't vote can be put in the "didn't want Trump" column. - Many of them live in a state where they knew ahead of time which way it would go. Why bother to vote, when it will make no difference in the outcome, because of the electoral college? - Many of them didn't want to go to the trouble of voting, but that didn't prevent them from having a preference. - Many of them were unable to vote for some practical reason. It is not safe to assume that the percentages in favour of the two main candidates were the same, among these various populations, as among those who voted. But neither is it safe to assume the percentages were any different. In any case, it makes no difference. That's not how democracy works. At least, not in America. In America, the "people's choice" is determined by the voters, not by the total population of people who could have voted. And the voters chose Trump. We can't even blame it on the electoral college this time. More Americans voted for Trump, knowing who and what he was, than those who voted for Harris.
I would argue it's determined by the two major parties (henceforth referred to as "the duopoly") which have a stranglehold on the rules, processes, and infrastructure of elections in 'Murica. They create impediments for third-party and independent candidates and if they still feel threatened will simply use bureaucratic shenanigans and/or the courts to remove the upstarts from ballots. If you go to a restaurant for dinner and are told your entree choices are limited to rat-on-a-stick or boiled cockroaches do you *really* have much of a choice? #TranscendTheDuopoly
Can't really disagree with any of that. I was referring to the way it works in theory, as opposed to the theoretical "what all the potential voters would have wanted". But in actual practice there is much to what you say. Though the will of the parties can be frustrated. In 2008, the Democrats' choice was Hillary Clinton, but the primary voters required them to go with Obama (who, IMO, was a better choice). In 2016, Donald Trump was not the first, or even second choice of the Republican Party, but here we are. And in any case, in a rational country, given the choice between Harris and Trump, the result should have been about 90% for Harris, even if for a majority of the voters that was a "lesser of two evils" vote. That more voters chose Trump than Harris, even knowing who he was and everything he had announced during the campaign that he was going to do, is not the fault of the political parties.
When faced with two unacceptable choices people either opt out of the process entirely, vote third party anyway (what I did), or base their selection on something entirely subjective like which candidate they hate the least, or which they believe will benefit them in some way that's important to them. Trump made anti-war noises with his face hole during the campaign and Harris was not only part of the administration that supported/defended a genocide and a proxy war she consistently signaled that her stances on those issues wouldn't be substantively different from Biden's. That, I believe, is what made the difference in why a critical mass of people held their noses and voted for boiled cockroaches instead of rat-on-a-stick. Now add in the fact that Harris got millions fewer votes than Biden did in 2020 and the result is what we have now. And let's not get too carried away with the idea of Harris being so obviously the lesser evil; remember her own campaign for the democrat nomination in 2020? She didn't get a single delegate and in fact I seem to recall she dropped out early because the writing on the wall was so legible even an empty-suit politician could read it. Nobody wanted her then, either. The only reason she was the democrat candidate in 2024 is because the democrats literally couldn't do anything else after allowing her to fail upward into the VP slot.
If you honestly think Harris would have been no better than Trump, then it is obvious that you are I are very, very far apart politically. From my point of view, if you think they are more or less equivalent, you are part of the problem.
I found them both unacceptable. Whether for the same or different reasons unacceptable is still unacceptable. I don't vote for unacceptable. We've "lesser of two evils" our way to this point in history and anyone who can't see what a colossal fuck-up that's been is, in my opinion, politically irrelevant at best.
And in my opinion, voting third-party (I did that for a number of years, before the Republicans became so bad that I just had to choose Democrats -- that's also known as "throwing away your vote as a protest") is still a lesser-evil vote. I have rarely seen a candidate who really suited me, so even voting third-party, I was just going for the least bad. It is also rather amusing to see someone who knowingly throws away their vote as a protest against the major parties saying others are "politcally irrelevant at best".
That's a good argument to make for, say, Bush V. Gore or Obama V. McCain. Not as salient a point with Trump V. Anyone With A Pulse. In the end, whatever Trump's stated positions, the end result was always going to be where we are. And that's a conclusion any rational person could have seen coming. People believed Trump when he said no more wars? The man lies with every breath. When he says anything, a rational person should expect the opposite, every time. To me, it's similar to how Ukraine embraced the Azog battalion after Russia invaded. Once the invaders are gone, they can deal with a pseudo-autonomous neo-Nazi brigade. But first, they use them to make sure the country still exists. For all Biden's faults, the country wasn't in economic and social free fall during his term. And it wouldn't have been under Harris, either.
Unacceptable is unacceptable no matter Who /vs/ Whom. The "lesser evil" scam is one of the stoopidest games the 'Murican public ever got conditioned into not only playing but defending and championing. I've been voting in presidential elections since the 1980s and not one vote has ever been thrown away because I've never voted for a republican or a democrat. The duopoly isn't entitled to votes. None. Under any circumstances. A vote outside the duopoly can't "take away" something they never had. A vote outside the duopoly can never count as a vote for the duopoly candidate someone doesn't like because someone else could say the same from the opposite perspective, rendering the entire argument moot. Arguing we have to vote for an unacceptable candidate now that things have gotten this bad is like standing in a burning building and saying: "I know repeatedly voting for a little bit of fire instead of a lot of fire hasn't worked out that well so far, but THIS time it's really really important that we only get a little bit of fire, okay?" Fuck outta here with that dumb shit. Wake me when the 'Murican public discovers the advantage of a bucket of water in the midst of a conflagration.
I know I voted for Nader as a Green Party candidate, and perhaps once as a write-in? I haven't kept a log of all my votes and the candidates' particulars and that was a long time ago. LoL
I think I am beginning to understand you. The analogies you have created in your mind are so far out of touch with reality that they justify seeing all Democrats and all Republicans as equally deadly threats. No candidate will ever be perfect, but those who more or less respect law and order, who more or less accept the result of an election when they or their party loses, who more or less respect other countries and other people, are preferable to those who don't even pretend to do any of that. You have chosen to let others make all the political decisions for you, by decreeing that all those choices are equally bad and only voting for candidates who have no chance of getting elected. (The 2016 election settled that for me. Up to and including 2016, I was voting third-party as well. But with two candidates as unpopular as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, if ever there was a chance for a third-party candidate, it was then. Instead, 95% of the people voted for one of those two. That was when I realized I was living in a dream world, thinking that I was actually accomplishing anything with my protest votes.) The only thing that will get you is that when the country falls apart completely, you will say: "It wasn't my fault. I never voted for these people." But you never did anything to prevent it, either.
Apropos to nothing, people need to read about cultural hegemony. It is no accident that the voting system produces the results that it does.
It's just something each person has to decide for themselves. I get both @Garraty_47 and @Asyncritus points, because when it came time for me to choose, I voted for Harris. I was going to vote Third Party or not at all, but a few of my Palestinian friends asked me if I would use my vote for Harris, because they believed that she was better than nothing, and so I did. I don't regret it, either, and the more I see Trump do his shit, the more I don't regret it. In a better system, our votes really would go to who we believe is going to do the best work and not just who will stop the Republicans from throwing trans people, women, children, and the disabled into the mulching machine the fastest. It's a shit system, and we deserve better. There are options, but our duopoly is locked in with corporations, and they sure as shit don't care what happens to people who don't have money. To paraphrase Malcolm Reynolds, "so here we are, on the raggedy edge."
