Rom [he/him]

Non-paywall: https://archive.ph/7NzMN

Their metric:

The Democrats dropped a candy bar on the ground and Trump shit on the floor. They then asked what I wanted for dinner.

Why can Democrats only offer candy bars for dinner when we need fresh fruits, vegetables, and actual healthy foods? The Democrats either don’t know the right way to govern, or they know but they don’t care. Do either of those options sound like a party that anyone should vote for?

I assume when we say ‘tankies’ we’re using the term as OP originally did, ie anyone who abstained from voting for Kamala because they don’t support genocide?

‘Tankies’ doesn’t mean anything, it’s a vibes word for “someone to the left of me I don’t like.” And most of the people who didn’t vote in 2024 aren’t leftist, because the American populace just isn’t.

I did not vote Democrat in 2024 because the Democrats are not entitled to my vote by pretending to be less awful than the other team. I did not vote Democrat anywhere on the ticket because I refuse to be complicit in genocide. That is the hard moral line I am taking. There is no excuse for genocide.

In light of comparing him to Trump though, Biden tried to set up a dock to distribute aid to Gazans when Israel tried to block it and continually threatened to stop sending these weapons if Israel bombed certain regions or were undertaking operations with crazy high civilian casualties.

Note that at no point did he stop sending weapons, the one action he could have taken at any time to actually stop the extermination. He did not want the genocide to stop.

And the dock was a waste of money that was never going to accomplish anything. Everyone knew that the whole time.

Trump’s policy is “let them bomb” and deporting people who disagree.

Evidently Biden’s policy was also “let them bomb,” as evidenced by the at least 14,000 tons of bombs he sent Netanyahu. And Biden deported more people than Trump 1. The terror is bipartisan and always has been.

Do you need a source for Biden providing aid and pressuring for Israel to deescalate while also funding them?

I don’t need a source to know that if he wanted to deescalate he could have just stopped sending them weapons at any time.

That’s not an excuse not to protest, but it is hypocritical of you guys to cause it to be much more risky to protest by allowing Trump to win and then try to blame others for not taking the risk.

We “caused it”? We “allowed Trump to win”? Who do you think your audience is? Nobody here voted for Trump. Unless you’re equating “not voting for Harris” with “voting for Trump” which is just baby-brained nonsense. The only thing that’s a vote for Trump is a vote for Trump.

I am boycotting American goods, and I have a recurring donation to the food bank to help bring aid to Gazans and other starving people.

Ok no arguments here. Legitimately way more useful than voting.

Show me 3 examples

No

but you guys by staying home that election sabotaged this goal for us both and made the genocide worse than before

Democrats lost all on their own by pretending the economy was fine despite everyone clearly noticing it was not, and continuing to double down on supporting a deeply unpopular genocide. There are by far not enough ‘tankies’ in the US to sway an election like that. If we had that kind of power we’d be pushing our own party instead. 90 million people didn’t vote in 2024, what are a couple thousand at most terminally online leftists compared to that?

The genocide was already bad under Democrats. No, we didn’t forget that Genocide Joe sent Israel hundreds of shipments of weapons and supported them full-heartedly in their slaughter of the Palestinian people.

If you focus on the material conditions of Gaza and think “which vote is going to lead to less Gazan lives lost” voting for Kamala seemed like a no brainer.

Voting for Democrats would not have lead to fewer Gazan lives lost, because the Democrats don’t give a fuck about Gazan lives. Biden was already giving them all the weapons they needed, and Harris made no indication she was going to change course. Harris would have enabled the genocide same as Trump.

It’s only when you bring your own ego into it “well I will never support genocide” that comes across like you’re willing to sacrifice Gazan lives to feel self righteous about your values.

My god please take a step back and look at yourself. Examine your views and have an ounce of introspection.

Had many of these tankies voted Kamala instead of staying home it would be so mucy easier to form a protest and get the pressure cooking on the dems

So what protests are you going to? What are you doing to put pressure on the Dems?

But because they stayed home (regardless of justification you might have) we’ve now lost the right to protest and many university students, scientists and academics are being disappeared into the night for speaking out.

Leftists did not cost the Democrats the election, Democrats just suck. Harris got 68 million votes in 2024 to Biden’s 81 million.

This simply would not have happened under Kamala.

It was already happening under Biden, you were just content to ignore it.

Just because someone is against Harris/the Democrats does not automatically mean they are in support of Trump/the Republicans. This might come as a surprise to you, but we hate Trump and the GOP, too. We’re just not under any illusions that the Democrats are going to fix anything.

We get it, you folks are all boned up about Trump and are stoked for this genocide

Link a single comment from Hexbear showing support for this genocide you lying fucking worm.

She promised to continue providing material support to Israel’s genocide, I’m not sure where you got the idea she would have been better.

It means the US War Department, who has been funneling weapons to Israel for them to use in their genocide of Palestinians, have investigated themselves and found they have done nothing wrong.

Further clarification: while he fled from Columbia to Fort Lauderdale, FL, the known pedophile Timothy Alan Livingston actually lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

we’ve read the same article

I don’t think we have, because if you did, you would have read that Columbia has issued an arrest warrant for this man. So no, it is not mob justice when people spread the name of the pedophile Timothy Alan Livingston of Cleveland, Ohio, who has a Colombian arrest warrant issued for him because he, over the course of one night, attempted to bring at least four different underage girls into his hotel room in an attempt to have sex with them.

You keep defending this pedophile and it’s creepy as fuck. Reconsider the decisions you’ve made that have brought you to this point in your life.

https://colombiaone.com/2024/04/06/timothy-alan-livingston-colombia/

The events began on the night of March 27th at around nine o’clock, when Livingston attempted to enter his room at the Gotham City Hotel in Medellin with what appeared to be two underage girls. A hotel staff member prevented their entry, so Livingston and the girls left the hotel located in the famous ‘El Poblado’ district.

Hours later, around four o’clock in the morning on March 28th, with no security checks at the establishment’s entrance, the American managed to enter his room with two different underage girls aged 12 and 13, as evidenced by security camera footage.

Following an anonymous call to the national police, the authorities arrived at the hotel and inspected the premises but found no evidence of the accused touching the minors, and both girls denied being touched. The 36-year-old suspect was detained for 12 hours at a Protection Transfer Center (CTP) but was released hours later, allowing him to return to his country on Monday, March 29th. The girls were seen by security cameras leaving the hotel calmly, seemingly counting several Colombian 50,000-peso bills.

Did someone frame him into twice bringing underaged girls to his hotel room in an area known for sex trafficking, including putting used condoms in his wastebasket? Or do you think it’s the far simpler explanation that he is a pedophile who was caught in the act?

You do not, in fact, need to run defense for pedophiles.

He took two 12- and 13-year-old girls into his hotel room located in an area known for sex tourism so he could talk with them about how dangerous it is to go into hotel rooms with strangers, he totally wasn’t going to do anything else, he swears.

Death to America. Death to Israel.

Again, it’s not binary for me

Should it be legal for consenting adults or not? Sounds like a binary question to me.

we shouldn’t also (in my opinion) just open the gates and let this substance into foray of our daily lives

You speak as if legalizing cannabis will suddenly make it available everywhere, but it won’t, because it already is everywhere, and it has been for decades. I had no trouble obtaining weed before my state legalized it, and I’m just a boring ass suburban white dude who barely knows anybody. Criminalization has never made cannabis go away, and continued criminalization isn’t going to change that.

I appreciate that you’re concerned about drug abuse and drug addiction, and those are real concerns that I don’t want to minimize, but refusing to legalize it won’t solve those problems, because most countries have been doing that for the better part of a century and it plainly hasn’t worked. If people want to abuse drugs, they’re going to abuse them whether or not they can acquire them legally. But at least when it’s legal people won’t have to fear going to jail because they got harassed by a cop while in possession, and making it legal reduces the stigma of drug abuse and makes seeking treatment easier to do.

If you are a leftist you should be against the criminalization of drug use or drug possession, especially for a drug as relatively harmless as cannabis. Like this really is a no-brainer, throwing someone in jail because they’re addicted to drugs doesn’t help them in any conceivable way. Drug abuse is a mental health problem and should be treated like one. Get them therapy and addiction support to help them get over it, and stop criminalizing drugs for people who can use it responsibly.

The most boomer shit I’ve seen on lemmy yet lmao. Reefer madness ass take.

The bullying is working, keep it up folks

Of course. But look around you. Our governments won’t do that, and no political party that could make it to power is pushing a platform like that. I’m more than happy to make kids playgrounds out of concrete if I knew that bandages were free.

So we should just throw up our hands and do nothing rather than fight for justice.

I agree. But it’s not like Alcohol usage will go down once Cannabis is legalized. If anything, people will use them together in a vicious cycle.

So? There are systems that can deal with these problems. Addiction clinics, therapy, support groups.

Throwing baseball bats into a dangerous hockey arena is never a good idea, even if the bats are made of foam.

Why would foam bats be dangerous to throw into a hockey arena? Have you ever been to a hockey game? They wear all kinds of protective equipment. Throwing foam bats at them would probably not hurt that much, if at all. Actually sounds like it would be pretty fun.

Alcohol’s effects are immediately visible. It’s hard to be an alcoholic and still look at yourself in the mirror happily the next morning. Weed has no such negative phenotype, if anything you will look happier the next morning for abusing it.

Cannabis use is such a menace to society that people who abuse it *checks notes* feel happier the next morning. The horror!

I get that cannabis isn’t a completely harmless drug, like most drugs legal or otherwise, but “it’s not perfectly safe so it should just keep being criminalized” is a bad take that has an entire history of not working. Legalize it and deal with the problems that crop up. Addiction and drug abuse aren’t new problems, we know how to handle them. And for the yet undiscovered health problems that cannabis might cause, legalizing it will open up avenues for research so we can actually figure out its dangers instead of just writing off all cannabis users as (as another user puts it) “mentally fried idiots” or just repeating the same reefer madness nonsense that’s been going around since the Nixon administration.

So legalize it and put effort into treating addictions and mental illnesses. This isn’t very hard.

Yeah of course, alcohol is just as bad, or worse in extreme cases

Most if not all cases. Cannabis is objectively less dangerous in practically every way.

Pot’s effects are internal

And alcohol’s effects aren’t?

Israel has built about 160 settlements housing some 700,000 Jews since it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem - land the Palestinians want as part of a future state - in the 1967 Middle East war.

Implying they didn’t already own the land before Zionists stole it from them. Fuck you, BBC.