Really minor side note. I don’t think comparisons of Trump to Hitler really help that much, there’s too many differences between the two men. What I think helps much more overall is comparisons of Trump to Benito Mussolini, who he much more closely aligns with, and who predated Hitler in the interwar period as a fascist dictator. The term fascist is originally an Italian word, even.

Mussolini comparisons capture Trump’s smallness and bumbling nature while still highlighting his ability to do great harm much more accurately. Trump is an American Mussolini.

Much more defensible during a zombie apocalypse. While the zombies probably wouldn’t be bringing 17th century cannons to bear against your walls, you’d still get superior firing angles for your defenders.

Some plastics are more stable than others. That said, we are admittedly far too lackadaisical with them in general.

To answer your direct question, we do have an FDA that does a passable job with some things, salmonella outbreaks, emergency vaccine development, stuff like that. There is probably some regulatory capture at play, though, where business interests get their people appointed into oversight roles. When a full half of our government is so vocally and rabidly pro-business, this is difficult to prevent in the long run.

Expanded and eased legal immigration pathways while still maintaining a stringent legal process. Properly funding DHS to handle increased migrant flows.

Next?

Not a bad article, but horrendously clickbaity headline.

War is very seldom inevitable. We tend not to focus much attention on wars that never started, because that does not make for very engaging history content. It happens far more frequently than a war actually starting though.

They don’t really think it that far through. Policy proposals aren’t considered, it’s more about vibe.

After the election, AOC reached out to her constituents to ask why some of them would vote for both Trump and her.

There’s a variety of answers, but the general sentiment is people want some way to “shake up Washington” without a real understanding of how exactly that would work or what would happen.

Photos of the protest show they’re pretty large, especially for a country with such a low total population. Maybe people just want to be free?

edit: Photos actually remind me of the cease fire protests in Israel now that I think about it. Also a lower population country with a large contingent of upset people in it.

Obama made this a goal of his second term, and while he achieved some success, the relationship between the west and the other major nuclear powers has significantly worsened since then.

It’s an admirable goal, but I’m not sure it’s going to be feasible any time in the near future.

Study of history.

People have been prophesying the end times for millennia now, for this reason or that reason. I think that ultimately they just don’t like the basic fact that change of some sort or another is inevitable in the world, it will not remain static and no system or institution will last forever. This does not result in any concrete end, however.

To quote Morpheus, “I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me, but because of the path that lies behind me.”

There’s also a fair bit of profit-driven exaggeration in just how bad things really are in certain arenas. Bad news makes good clickbait, good/neutral news less so. So the ratio of bad to good news we receive is not actually representative of the full picture of what is happening in the world.

Assuming he abides by constitutional law, this will be his final term.

That last line was the funniest thing I’ve read in the past few days, so thank you for that.

There’s around 2 million Gazans still alive. That’s a lot of ethnicity still to be cleansed if cleansing is the goal.

On the arms shipments, we may try lawsuits via the Leahy Law if the ethnic cleansing ramps up. The way the law is written, it actually looks at arms shipments all the way down to the granular level of individual military units. It does not say arms cannot be exported to countries engaging in war crimes, it specifically says individual military units that commit war crimes cannot receive arms. If they choose to engage in a broader campaign of organized displacement out of Gaza or starvation in places where combat has largely died down, a larger number of military units could potentially become implicated, which could maybe make a lawsuit more feasible. We’ll have to see.

Regarding AIPAC, since Citizen’s United determined that monetary donations are a form of speech, this requires either an amendment or recapture of the Supreme Court. Otherwise Americans are allowed to lobby the government for whatever they wish, even if they are doing so at the behest of a foreign government. They have to disclose that, but so long as they do, they are simply exercising their Constitutional rights as perceived by the current Supreme Court. This isn’t going away any time soon, the current law is very clear and pretty much ironclad, rooted in the Constitution itself via the Bill of Rights.

Some good answers already. To add, in the media sphere Pod Save America and their related branches is a liberal progressive media organization that tries to run counter to the conservative media ecosystem, trying to ride the line between policy wonkery and approachability.

I kind of understand Bush vs Kerry. Bush had a vision. It was a crazy neocon vision, but it was a vision and he used it to communicate effectively enough that we still occasionally meme about bombing people into freedom.

Obama had a clear vision, and communicated it well. Hope, prosperity for the middle class, international leadership. Biden had a vision, a less divisive America where we came together and worked on overdue problems. Hilary didn’t really, nor did Kerry or Gore. They were more policy administrator types who focused on specific policies and administration, and the idea of incremental improvement just didn’t resonate with people.

Trump, for all his failings, does have a vision he is capable of communicating to the American people. Harris did too, better than Hilary anyway, but it didn’t really come online until fairly late into the campaign and stayed a little too nebulous. I do think she was hurt in this regard by getting such a short campaign with no real prep time, she was evolving in the right direction.

I think we need a Bernie or AOC, someone with a powerful vision and ability to clearly communicate it, to the point of literally cudgeling people over the head with it. And we need to vote them in during the primary, over any competent administrator types, despite the fact that we are fully aware of how effective and necessary those policy administrators can be. Our valuing of them is a place where we’re out of touch with the broader American electorate though.

edit: MLK Jr was good at this. He had a dream, and it was a simple one that any person could visualize in their head. It didn’t require any policy expertise to understand it. We need that.

I think you were really lucky, a pocket knife is a lot riskier than a can of mace or taser or something. Easy to take away. But if it’s what you got, then it’s what you got. Also should’ve aimed a little lower.

Yes, he took all our guns, too. Look, there’s none to be found anywhere.

No, they’ve been getting progressively crazier since 2016.

2000 was fairly divisive, it went to the Supreme Court after all. But it wasn’t even a fraction this dramatic, people mostly shrugged and figured GWB would be like his father, which was unfortunate, but sane at any rate. Nobody was really predicting 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.

2004 was pretty dull. John Kerry challenged GWB but felt sort of like an empty suit.

2008 was nice, Obama was a strong and exciting candidate vs the very known quantity of McCain, who was a moderate repub known for bipartisanship. Sarah Palin provided for hours of entertaining impersonations by people like Tina Fey, but since she was the VP candidate nobody really cared.

2012 was dull. Romney was a strong candidate, another moderate repub. But Obama was fine, he hadn’t broken the country or anything. Brought us out of a recession, even if people were upset about bank bailouts and stuff. Lot of people got health insurance.

Then it starts getting spicy.