I mean, wasn't it?
The only people that can claim that are folks that voted for Hillary. Not voting or voting third party, you're still participating, you're just pulling the lever that reads, "I'll go with whoever the majority is".
That year it turned out to be Trump. You did choose, a passive choice is still a choice.
Look, you can do what you want, but you should stop pretending you somehow aren't partly responsible for a Trump presidency because you went third party. If a restaurant offers chicken or beef, and you say "whatever everyone is having", and they gave you chicken?
You did choose. You chose chicken.
You said, "I don't really care what I get, let other people decide." Letting other people decide for you is still a choice.
The restaurant isn't selling shrimp, bud. I don't know what to tell ya.
You're not 5 years old. Pick what you want to eat, and stop complaining about it. It's chicken or beef, what do you want? I mean, there's ways around it? You could have cooked at home, there's a reason people tell you to vote down ballot, pay attention to local races, bring up people through the system etc.
All that is work. It takes time. And you have to do the dishes afterwards. You didn't want to do any of that, (Honestly I don't either) so we're both eating at the same restaurant.
And unfortunately, that means we get to eat what the restaurant is selling. Chicken or beef.
Voting is the lowest possible effort you can make when participating in the political process. And not voting is as much a choice as voting for the options others present to you. You just chose to do whatever the group decides.
You're doing the equivalent of showing up at the end of a group project you skipped out on and expecting everyone to redo all their work because you don't like either of the options presented.
No amount of whining and moaning is going to change the fact that you're still getting the same grade everyone else is getting. You are getting on everyone's nerves though. Nobody likes a lazy entitled dude that 'thinks' he should be in charge but isn't willing to actually do any work.
You can choose not to vote. But if things go wrong, don't claim you're somehow above it all.
It's frankly ridiculous.
Okay bud. Good luck out there.
The US had a 2x mortality rate of Canada. 6x higher compared to South Korea, 10x of Japan the first two years of Covid. Even going with the lowest number, about 500,000 Americans could have survived with even marginally competent leadership. One that might not have...
Disbanded the Pandemic response team Obama set up.
Undercut the messaging from the CDC because Trump couldn't handle Fauci having a higher approval rating than him.
Spewed constant misinformation about everything from bleach, sunlight to ivermectin while professionals were desperately trying to do their job.
Intentionally dragging his feet on the relief effort because someone told him that it was hitting the cities first and the Democrats would be most affected.
Goddamn masks. All he had to do was go on TV and tell his little cultists to wear the damn things, and we could have prevented so much of the deaths that came from the original strain/Delta. (Not Omicron)
... Hitler killed less Americans than Trump did. That's just facts.
That used to be the case until 2017. Highest bracket was 39%, but they had a weird system where it went UP until about 350Kish, (Income between 100K~350K) and then the variable rate started dropping again for income past that, back down to 35%. Would have been fair to assume any fortune 500 company not doing shady shit would have paid an effective rate of 35%.
Trump's tax cuts drastically decreased that, down to 21% flat for everyone. 28% would still be a tax cut over what it was up til 2017.
Make your own arguments instead of copy pasting things. It's lazy, and you haven't addressed any of my arguments.
If you care enough about the issue to have a discussion about it, at least use your own words and arguments that show you at least thought about the issues at hand.
I laid out my argument for why we can't unilaterally cut support to Israel clearly and repeatedly. Least you can do is attempt the same if you want to convince anyone.
I know I wrote a lot and I wouldn't expect you to read it all, but I addressed this as well, using the US-Mexico war as an example.
We haven't given back Texas and California yet. If you invade a country and they take your territory, you can ask for a do-over, but it's probably not going to happen.
As I've noted, WE created this whole mess. And we shouldn't expect others to comply to standards we would never accept ourselves.
If you want to take it a step further, I posited a hypothetical situation where Mexico invaded and killed 20,000 Americans and took another 4000 hostage.
And what our response would likely be. If you aren't lying to yourself, you know exactly what we would do, especially if we have someone like Donald Trump at the helm when it happens.
Do you think we'd react differently today? That's a super straight forward question.
If anyone anywhere, regardless of the horrific shit we visited upon them attacked a US territory and killed 20,000 people and took another 4,000 hostage, and we had a Donald Trump in office at the time, what would we do?
This isn't one of those, "Rules for thee, but not for me" kind of situations, is it? Because I'm not doing this to deflect things from Israel, I'm saying WE did it, so at bare minimum we have an obligation to protect the lives of the 20 million people we placed in a death-trap of our making.
Don't change the subject, man.
What would we do? You know the answer.
Netanyahu is Israel's Donald Trump. Hamas knew exactly what would happen and did it anyway. Just like you know exactly what would happen if the above scenario happened in America.
You just don't want to say it. Because that would make you a hypocrite. Because accepting your first position, that we need to leave Israel high and dry, applying the same moral standards to us, you might as well be saying, "Death to America."
If you don't wanna go that far, guess what. You've got double standards. And that is a moral conundrum only WE have. Most other countries that have a terrorist attack don't invade sovereign nations and murder millions of people.
When France had their huge terrorist attack, their PM went on stage and said, "This will not change us." They still accept more Muslim refugees than we ever will.
If anyone doesn't get to talk shit, it's us. Especially, ESPECIALLY regarding anything in the middle east, because we engineered the whole thing for our benefit. Abandoning 20 million Jews we propped up specifically to draw aggro for us is cowardly. Denying the reality of what we did because you want to pretend you're really a 'good' person is laughable.
You live in a house with potable water that comes out of the tap. You have any idea how insane that sounds to most of the world? Just wasting drinking water like that?
All the things you take for granted was built on the blood of others. You live in America, get off your high horse. The name of the game is harm mitigation. You want to cosplay a goody-two-shoes? That's nice. Tell it to the 4.5 million people that died because we couldn't be bothered to make sure Florida got another thousand Gore votes. If you're an American, you're ruining things for everyone else, just by existing.
The US has 1/20th of the global population and produces 1/4 of global emissions and waste. 5x the global average. Know those billions that are going to die in places like Africa as global warming accelerates in the coming decades?
That's us.
So, if you wanna know why I think your phariasaic platitudes are gag inducingly vile, it's because your vapid single-issue hot take is ACTUALLY harmful to humanity as a whole. Republicans should never be in power. And no, you wanting to play brinkmanship with democracy itself at stake isn't funny to anyone actually paying attention.
Your lifestyle is only possible because of the absolutely heinous shit we visited upon others. You want them to pack up and leave? First find them a place to go.
Better yet, campaign to bring the 2 million Palestinians HERE. You think people living in Gaza right now wouldn't immediately accept an offer to come live in America?
Sure, we'd have all the problems that we were so eager to inflict on the Israelis. We'll get bombed, people will die, and we'll probably finally get our share of the terrorist attacks Israel and Europe have been dealing with for decades. But unlike them, we'd actually deserve it. And they'd acclimate to secular society a lot faster here than they ever would living there.
Let Israel have the whole thing, and lets see if that changes a damn thing. It won't, but at least you will actually learn WHY Jordan and Egypt refuse to accept Palestinian refugees. (Hint: It's called assassinations and coup attempts)
I can't tell if you just aren't bothering to read what I wrote or if you are just looking for the closest tangentially related thing to copy-paste.
I just said expecting them to return land when we're keeping Texas and California is a case of "Do as I say, not as I do."
Yes, Israel removed Palestinian settlements. At our behest. We told them that land was now theirs. And the countries surrounding Israel telegraphed invasion plans for days before the six day war.
Revisionism aside, are you still trying to lay this at the feet of the Israelis instead of ours? We did that. It's cowardly to try to pretend otherwise.
You say that and yet, we have protests about Israel/Palestine and not a peep about reparations for Native Americans. We killed 99.9% of their population. It's easy to pay lip service after the fact, it's done.
Guess it's easier to pretend you care when you don't have settlements being raided and entire families being scalped. And you killed so many of them that there aren't enough of them left to complain about their treatment. We know what we did do when that was the reality though.
I ask again, what would we do if a tribe went rogue and started doing that now?
Do you think we've grown over the past 200 years? Think we'd react differently today?
Be honest.
And that's why you completely sidestepped my assertion that we'd never do what you're asking of Israel right now?
9/11 was just my imagination I guess.
Wait... no it wasn't. We killed some 940,000 directly and our wars resulted in a cumulative loss of some 4.5 million people.
What... Americans didn't know we were mucking about in the middle east for decades?
You think we wouldn't do that now, if we lost ten times as many people?
....With Donald Trump as president?
I didn't ask you if you were a conscientious objector. Unless your name is Donald Trump that means diddly squat. I asked what America would do in that situation if you weren't lying to yourself.
And when that day comes to pass, do we deserve the death sentence you want to inflict on Israelis? Cause... we already showed what we'd do in those circumstances.
If your argument is that we shouldn't care because there's no way to accomplish that in North America, why should we care when a suicidal terrorist group complains they're being oppressed while they're trying to kill 20 million people in Israel?
They got exactly what they wanted. Even the appeal to our humanity in an attempt to get us to stop supporting Israel was planned out from day 1. The end goal of which, is to make it easier to wipe Israel off the map.
You think ending Israel and killing everyone in it is just something Hamas pays lip service to?
It's not like every country around them immediately invaded them the moment they were founded, right? Don't get me wrong, we should never have put them there in the first place. It was the 1950s, nobody else wanted the Jews in their own countries either. But they're there now. We put them there.
Hell, the whole reason the region is full of religious fundamentalist freaks is because we made a point of destabilizing the entire region so we could steal their oil without having to pay for it.
We did that. We put them there, screwed over the entire region and gave the locals an easy scapegoat to project their grievances onto, and after 60 years of it, you want to complain that they're now too mean to their neighbors so we should leave em out to dry so they can all get killed? While we sit here getting fat off the riches we stole?
You want to wash our hands of it now? Well that's convenient. It's not like we don't owe everything we take for granted to our ability to print money and force the entire world to buy oil using our currency.
Honestly, I think we should take a little responsibility. For once in our miserable lives.
Clearly, because reading my comments it isn't immediately obvious what my political inclinations are.
And we committed genocide against the Native Americans and put the few that were left in barren strips of land no one wanted to fend for themselves.
Fine, let's give them back everything first. Then demand others do the same. To this day we impose more rules on the Native Americans than Israel does to Palestine.
We should pray that Israel doesn't do to Palestine what we did to the Native Americans because there would be about 500 of them left, and they'd be stuffed into a piece of land the size of a Walmart parking lot.
And yet... despite the absolutely horrific shit we inflicted on the Native Americans... if your local tribe started kidnapping Americans and beheading them do you think anyone will care why?
You don't see the irony in this?
I'm not saying the Palestinians aren't justified in trying to take back their lands. I'm saying the Israelis are there because WE carved out that piece of land and told them they could go there. I'm saying WE decided to destabilize the entire region and sowed division so we could steal their oil afterwards. And WE directed the resulting (entirely justified) resentment towards Israel, using them as a convenient scapegoat to take the target off of our own backs.
We do not have the moral high ground here, and pearl clutching about the Israelis being racist towards people who are trying to kill them (because of us) and trying to say we should cut off all military aid and leave them to die is a morally abhorrent position to take for someone who lived their whole life steeped in the wealth that we extracted from their blood.
Because if that's your solution for Israel, applying that same standard to us would mean we'd have to collectively commit mass suicide first. We've done a lot worse for a lot less.
Those who live in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones. Our house isn't even glass. It's made out of single sheets of phyllo dough.
And the scary thing is, we weren't even the worst of the lot. Look at what world dominating empires have done historically and most of them were so, so much worse than us. Hell, look what China and Russia is doing NOW. As horrible as we were/are, just about everyone else who attained this level of power has done worse.
There is no way to atone for everything we did. But even if you wanted to start, letting 20 million people die in a death-trap we created because it's no longer convenient for us to maintain it is certainly not the way to start things.
We put them there to draw aggro for all the messed up things we do in the region so we can steal their oil.
They've been doing that for 60 years. Every rocket, every terrorist attack they took in that timeframe should have been ours to take. We engineered the whole thing.
We got all the benefit, while they took all the losses. You want to blame them for being racist to the people trying to kill them every day? When we, as Americans are pretty much the entire reason it's happening?
Have you seen pictures of Iran in the 70s?
We did this. All of it. We don't get to wash our hands and pretend this isn't all on us.
What did Mexico do to us? Guatamala? We overthrow governments for fruit companies on this side of the pond. The idea of US taking the moral high ground on a situation we created is insane.
If you actually want the moral high ground, know what we should be doing? Campaign to bring the 2 million Palestinians HERE. You think people living in Gaza right now wouldn’t immediately accept an offer to come live in America? And they’d acclimate to secular society a lot faster here than they ever would living in Gaza which has been blown to bits already.
Sure, we’d have all the problems that we were so eager to inflict on the Israelis. We’ll get bombed, people will die, and we’ll probably finally get our share of the terrorist attacks Israel and Europe have been dealing with for decades. But unlike them, we’d actually deserve it. Last I checked, OPEC isn't selling oil in Euros.
Let Israel have the whole thing, and lets see if that changes a damn thing. It's the LEAST we could do after using them as cannon fodder for the past 60 years. And these performative leftists will actually learn WHY Jordan and Egypt refuse to accept Palestinian refugees. (Hint: It’s called assassinations and coup attempts)
Israel has the equivalent of Donald Trump at the helm right now. And Hamas staged the equivalent of ten 9/11s, handing a deeply unpopular conservative PM an extension on his political power for the foreseeable future.
Netanyahu and Hamas both want this conflict to go on as long as possible. Netanyahu because it lets him keep power, Hamas because they want to use the 2 million people in Gaza as a pawn to shift the world against Israel. Their end goal is to wipe out the 20 million people living in Israel, and their own founders have stated that that's not where it ends. They're not going to stop until the whole world is under an Islamic Caliphate.
Hamas absolutely does not give a damn about anyone living in Gaza. And they'll continue to brainwash and sacrifice the children, either as meat shields when they're young, or as soldiers when they get older. Israel grants asylum to gay Palestinians that escape from Gaza or the West Bank. Sometimes their families will kidnap them, bring them back and behead them.
I don't think it's pure coincidence they go looking for Pride Parades.
Terrorists do terrorist things. If we want this to ever end, realistically the only way to do it would be to kill the Hamas leadership in any way possible and somehow undo 20 years of brainwashing they inflicted on the Gaza population. As for Israel, think how racist the average American living in a border state is. How much worse do you think they'd be if Mexico was shooting rockets at our border towns every few days? Even without the rockets, we've been messing with South America for a hundred years, making sure we'd never have competition on this side of the pond.
Are they racist? Absolutely. We'd be way worse under similar circumstances. Can you imagine what we'd do if Mexico invaded Texas and killed 20,000 people and kidnapped another 4000 and took them as hostages?
The US claimed everything from California to Texas after a war with Mexico. Technically they were here before we were. Should we all pack up and leave too? Why are we expecting folks to do things we'd never do ourselves?
https://www.newsweek.com/video-shows-mike-lindells-new-undercover-look-dnc-1942686
If you scroll down a bit, you can see his 'disguise'. It's definitely him.