As an autistic person this has never made sense, the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group, like at it's extreme murdering others. After becoming aware of my diagnosis I've started studying "normal" people and it's insane what you are willing to withstand just to belong to a group or in society. Now I think that some things "normal" people participate in they think is actually fun, like hanging around others doing nothing productive, which after reaching 40 years old, and having a burnout, I also now enjoy just hanging around and belonging to a group. Also social capital, or belonging to a group, has many positive advantages.

Even HN has these rituals. You have to downvote when someone randomly mentions Gaza, e.g. this comment.

Limiting your family size is a lazy, short term solution.

Having a bigger family and teaching them the right values is a much stronger and long term approach.

The only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is not buying.

Everyone's contribution is insignificant, and yet it all adds up.

This is rather like saying the average player in a football match scores 0 goals, therefore 0 goals were scored.

Even so, an electric car is not particularly good for the environment.

Bicycles and public transportation.

yeah, the real carbon footprint of especially non-wimpy EVs remains to be seen. EV recycling seem to be as real as gasoline from algae, the slides look beautiful but all mysteriously fail to take off.

I Netanyahu retires, Eisenkot or Bennett take up the mantle, which is arguably worse. But he's got no reason to retire, given how he's polling now.

Iran isn't going to drop their nuclear program. They know full well that IF this deal actually works out (it won't, but just for the sake of argument...), they can go back to their clandestine enrichment program and nobody will actually look very hard (just like before). It'll be a return to normalcy, except they'll also be exacting tolls on the strait and building up with that new fat wad of free cash. And if it doesn't work out, they just stand firm until the USA gets tired and goes home with a fig leaf "we won" as November nears. Either way, similar result.

Russia is going to lose this war in a slow and grinding attrition that will smack of Afghanistan, that's not in question. But their ambitions aren't going to die. When they're ready again a decade later (and if NATO is still a thing), they'll grab a chunk of NATO land and extend their nuclear umbrella over it, daring the paper tiger to do something.

The drones and missiles helped them to not lose the war, but they were significantly damaged by the initial strikes. A nuclear capability might have been sufficient deterrent to prevent those.

> "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely"

Such an option was offered to him and was refused.

History shows that a revolution can only be started by a group of potential elites who hope to displace the current elites.

It would be a start. D isn't much better than R, but it is slightly better.

Although R really knows how to do politics - you see how they're all suddenly anti-Israel a few months before the midterms when most of the country is probably going to vote against Israel?

The US is a statistical outlier in almost every single metric. Almost nothing about the US generalizes, not to the world as a whole, and not to other Western countries. Certainly not to functioning liberal democracies.

The US suffers from Duverger's Law which means that any vote for anything other than one of the two big parties is wasted. In my country, we currently have 17 different parties, each with different variations of policies. Some are outliers, but many of them have or have had power to some degree over the years. Your cable-tv problem still exists, but to a much smaller extent.

In this case, one of the packages is uninspiring and the other is fascism, so the choice is fairly clear.

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Which is enough to make the rest of the world hold their breath, waiting to see what the sum of little choices will be.

Candidates don't find it difficult to express the most popular opinions in the short time before an election. You really do have to know what they did previously if you want to correctly evaluate them.

Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.

From outside the US, nothing about him has really been predictable, except that he consistently lies about everything.

The only predictable thing about this American presidency is the total chaos that has been inflicted on the world by millions of intellectually degenerate Americans. This is what the world sees. Almost nobody is making excuses for him, everybody is trying to move on without the US.

So yeah, in that sense another war is simultaneously an unpredictable outcome and an unsurprising outcome.

How many wars and military actions did he start in his first term? How many times did he do the opposite of what he said he did? The specific case is unpredictable, the general pattern isn't.

The real question is should you have trusted his manifesto after the last time?

During his first term, his continuous threats to north Korea were enough to force congress to restrict presidential powers (the whole fire and fury stuff), and that's not counting Venezuela, Syria and others.

It was evident to anyone aware and paying attention.

I agree with this. What was certain and predictable was that Harris was a war candidate (the Democrats presided over the first year of genocide and were intending to continue).

MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.

Since January 6th it was clear that he would be willing to secure his power in any way. The most obvious way in america is to start a war.

And even if noone could predict that - the worst part is all the Americans sitting by, twiddling thumbs after seeing Trump making the whole world worse. You are the loudest "democracy" on the planet, but noone demands the necessary accountability from the dear leader. Democracy does not only happen on election day.

If you paid attention to his actions while in office, rather than a selection of his words while on the campaign trail, it was pretty clear he wasn't in the least bit interested in being a "peace president;" he just wanted the Nobel Peace Price because Obama got one.

Frankly, bullshit. Harris did not seemed more pro war or aggressive, unless you live in deep conservative bubble.

The two party system is what's wrong with politics, along with social media, bad faith political advocacy, and the GOP.

Doing what you feel necessary or useful at a local scale is still empowering. Understanding that the effects will be mostly local as well is a good thing, but choosing your battles is perfectly healthy.

Cause people unaware of those events vote to cause those events.

Large groups of people all contributing small amounts towards a goal none of them could accomplish on their own is the only way any of those things ever get done.

Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.

If I lived in 1930 I would definitely care about a city candidate's stances on Germany/Judaism. Even though that candidate couldn't do anything to affect the Germany/Judaism situation, it would still tell me a lot about that candidate.

We have the same problem in the UK. Local councils went all in on the Palestine thing when their job is basically collecting trash, roadworks, planning and education.

I can’t realistically vote a candidate in who doesn’t talk about trash collection but does talk about Middle Eastern politics.

In my ideal world, explaining this stance would be a part of democracy.

It’s an uphill battle vs a tribal mentality, though.

It has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine really. That’s because many Jewish people in the US have had it hammered into their heads, usually through political messaging delivered adjacent to religious practice, that this type of activity is essential to the survival of Israel and of themselves.

It’s the same playbook successfully used with evangelical Christian groups and now even some Catholics. Latinos literally vote for people whose stated aim is to round them up. The technique is fear endorsed by a trusted leader or in a sacred place.

If the political person says the thing they are supposed to say, they’re safe. Otherwise, they want to destroy your way of life.

If there’s no way to know the truth, how do you know you’ve come to the right conclusion?

Did you know Hitler was the president of Germany for about ten years before he started the holocaust?

Was he a fascist during that time?

Fascism is a way overused term. Personally I tend to avoid it unless we're seeing paramilitary forces shooting civilians in the face. Other people may have lower thresholds.

> how are all the people who insult Trump on social media still alive or not locked up

I think you'll find that some of them actually are locked up, and a few of them are dead.

So it can't be fascism or be close it it until we have fully operational death camps?