I didn’t say 330 million registered voters. I said 330 million people, as in total population of the country including all nonvoters and ineligible.

At any rate, I don’t think any singular factor dominated, each person has their own mix of issues. Economy was a big one, including things like rent prices that the feds have little control over in our system. Gaza was a smaller one, definitely. There’s at least a dozen more.

Polls cannot really accurately capture this, they’re too clumsy a tool. Focus groups can though.

There are around 50 million registered dems in the country and Harris is currently sitting at around 70 million votes. Our problem is everyone else in a country with 330 million people.

Keep the faith, Brits. Perhaps Brexit washed some of the insanity out early enough that the far right continues to struggle there.

Hopefully we’re not slowly returning to the Napoleonic Era, I’m not sure you guys could withstand all of continental Europe a third time.

I somewhat agree, though I’ll point out people were doing quite well at the end of Clinton and Obama’s presidencies. They flipped to the other party anyway.

We’ve been seeing a see-saw effect for awhile, where without incumbency, the party last holding the Presidency loses. This reflects a general, vague dissatisfaction with the status quo, mostly felt at the emotional level instead of intellectually reasoned. The world is too complicated for the average person to really figure out, and they don’t like that. While you can distract yourself from this in innumerable ways, or paper over it with something like religion, it’ll surface when it comes time to consider new leadership.

Then, in addition to the various issues people will discuss, I think being a woman hurt Harris somewhat with latinos, where the culture prizes a more Trumpian machismo.

America isn’t a hellscape

gasp How dare you…

Her recipes are alright. Nothing super special, but she’s good at knowing when she can take a shortcut and when she should do something the hard way

I use her recipe for oven fries.

I hope so too.

With a strong enough swell of support from Israelis, the need to work with Netanyahu to maintain our reputation of standing by our allies and maintaining some leverage over the Israeli government would evaporate. It’d create room for a strong pivot that would still allow us to plausibly threaten Netanyahu with consequences, maintaining his inability to finish his ethnic cleansing goals.

Needs a lot of people though, enough to give some plausible cover to what could otherwise be perceived as a betrayal of an established alliance. We could say we’re still standing with the Israelis, though, look, here’s their signatures. The rest of them are clearly traumatized and not in their right senses.

I don’t think we’d need a majority of their population to sign or anything, but a lot for sure.

Thank you for the blurb.

Takes a few months. Most notable symptom of withdrawal is usually headaches, lasts a day or two. It’s not a severe addiction, it’s a fairly mild one as they go.

Hm, that is interesting. Definitely does fit with American Cold War activities, so I’m inclined to believe it.

No, the Palestinians are certainly not being helped in any way by Netanyahu. He and his right wing cronies want them all gone, I’m fairly sure. Despite that goal, however, most of the 2 million+ residents of Gaza remain alive. That would probably not be the case at this point, without western leverage being exerted on Netanyahu to restrain him.

It would actually be easier for him to kill them all if he did not have to maintain alliances. Not harder. If he wants to remain safe vs Hezbollah and Iran, he must preserve most of the Gazan lives, even though he really doesn’t want to.

Source on the Australia stuff? That’s new to me.

Arming genocidal regimes is nothing new, the Leahy Law was created in the first place because these things were problems. Ultimately though, without that influence over Netanyahu, the Palestinians would be worse off, not better.

Netanyahu doesn’t need big bombs to starve a captive population, no matter how much people like to fantasize about Israel magically letting them all go as soon as arms are embargoed.

I don’t think the US can force S Korea to support Israel outside of conspiracy theory puppet-countries land.

Seoul will “respond with all measures available”.

Perhaps the law that forbids arms exports to warfighting countries could be re-examined? Wouldn’t even need to toss the whole thing, a new law could probably be passed to create an exception.

I’m sure some of S Korea’s gigantic reserves of 155mm would make a very significant difference.

“I am your king.” “Well, I didn’t vote for you.” “You don’t vote for kings.” “Well, how’d you become king, then?”

[Angelic music plays… ]

As the dev’s flagship instance, there is only so much that can be done. There is also only so much that should be done, since they should have the right to run their own instance however they see fit. They did put the work in to create the service, after all.

I think the most reasonable solution around this is to simply push mbin a little harder. Since .ml will always garner a certain degree of attention as the dev’s instance, simply pivoting more attention to a lemmy-related service may be the best option to make us more appealing to less politically-interested people overall.

Yep. There’s not really enough content in a lot of single Instance communities, but when you sign up for all of them it gets to a reasonable degree of activity.

A large number of good sketch artists are going to be needed in Afghanistan soon.

“Advancing” isn’t good enough. You can’t think of any times someone was able to advance at some point, but still ended up losing a war?

Wars aren’t about land, something Russians should know better than anyone else after what they did to Hitler and Napoleon.

Interestingly, I think this indicates the outbreak of real hostilities is slightly less likely. The existence of roads in/around the DMZ would be to the benefit of the party launching an offensive. The fewer roads there are, the harder it becomes to effectively deploy troops south of the line.

Blowing up transportation links is a defender’s trick. The attacker seeks to preserve them to aid in further troop movement and supply. Unless the plan is to launch a limited attack and then sit back in a defensive posture. I don’t see how a war of attrition benefits the North though, with their much smaller population and economy.