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2024 US Presidential Election

I gotta throw this out there:

To those who are voting Uncommitted to protest Biden's handling of the Israel/Palestine conflict (which I also do not like)---
Do you honestly believe that Trump will do a better job? I don't recall that he is particularly sympathetic to Muslims. Or that he understands anything about foreign policy whatsoever, other than his deep admiration for Putin and other dictators.

Just sayin'

(edit) PS--- I just heard on NPR news that a lot of people might just "sit it out" in the general election. If enough people do that, Trump wins.
 
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is there still a problem in the middle east?

in 2020 trump put his best man on the job of resolving the middle east conflict - jared kushner. in september that year, kushner claimed the work he was doing was responsible for the "beginning of the end of the Israel-Arab conflict." he went on to say, of the israeli-palestinian conflict that "Those issues aren’t as complicated as people have made them out to be."

so i naturally assumed this was all wrapped up by now...

alasdair
 


Media Reaction GIF by Leroy Patterson
 
American Samoa was the only primary that Michael Bloomberg won after the most annoying campaign of all time in 2020 so I’m not sure how indicative it is of anything
 
American Samoa was the only primary that Michael Bloomberg won after the most annoying campaign of all time in 2020 so I’m not sure how indicative it is of anything

Bloomberg wasn't an incumbent President... idk if an incumbent president has ever lost a primary before , at least in modern times?
 
Biden rally I just watched had about 20 people there.
Trumps filled an entire stadium.
Is it that reality or bullshit?
 
well, the response to the frankly surreal republican rebuttal to the sotu has not disappointed. twitter exploded afterwards...

alasdair
 
Biden rally I just watched had about 20 people there.
Trumps filled an entire stadium.
Is it that reality or bullshit?
You are a smart dude Soso. I see it. And I get your feelings towards the left. But being under the spell of a cult is not what being a republican is in 2024. I come from a big conservative family. They live in many states. A lot in Texas. None are voting trump and a few said while they will not talk about it, the are going into the booth and voting Biden and not saying anything just to get to 2028. Woman's rights and military being the biggest issue. But when it comes to observing crowds take a closer look. My cousin in Texas had a friend of color get paid to sit right behind trump. The trump crowds are small. The dems have a lot more momentum. Right now there is no republican party. They let a con man hijack it. Now his daughter in law will pass the donation basket around in the trump church. That is not a conservative party anymore. If my family members that were stubborn as hell changed then something is wrong. 6 years ago they would be saying all kinds of support for trump. Not now. So what happened?

I want younger people too. Biden seemed fine. I mean I do not believe any rhetoric, neither trump or Biden has denentia. That is just political mud slinging. But they are both old men under a lot of stress. But trump would just suck all the money out of the RNC and it will cave. More court cases are going to pop up. Too many younger prosecutors want to get a "former president". And they can do it validly because trump does break laws.

Biden will speed boat us to 2028. Yes I want younger, but right now we don't have it. And anyone that thinks trump will do anything for them is in delusion. When I put Biden and trump together I see more integrity and morality in Biden than con man trump. But being from NY I knew that. The poor people in say Wyoming have not figured that out yet.
 
You are a smart dude Soso. I see it. And I get your feelings towards the left. But being under the spell of a cult is not what being a republican is in 2024. I come from a big conservative family. They live in many states. A lot in Texas. None are voting trump and a few said while they will not talk about it, the are going into the booth and voting Biden and not saying anything just to get to 2028. Woman's rights and military being the biggest issue. But when it comes to observing crowds take a closer look. My cousin in Texas had a friend of color get paid to sit right behind trump. The trump crowds are small. The dems have a lot more momentum. Right now there is no republican party. They let a con man hijack it. Now his daughter in law will pass the donation basket around in the trump church. That is not a conservative party anymore. If my family members that were stubborn as hell changed then something is wrong. 6 years ago they would be saying all kinds of support for trump. Not now. So what happened?

I want younger people too. Biden seemed fine. I mean I do not believe any rhetoric, neither trump or Biden has denentia. That is just political mud slinging. But they are both old men under a lot of stress. But trump would just suck all the money out of the RNC and it will cave. More court cases are going to pop up. Too many younger prosecutors want to get a "former president". And they can do it validly because trump does break laws.

Biden will speed boat us to 2028. Yes I want younger, but right now we don't have it. And anyone that thinks trump will do anything for them is in delusion. When I put Biden and trump together I see more integrity and morality in Biden than con man trump. But being from NY I knew that. The poor people in say Wyoming have not figured that out yet.
Jack - just wanted to say that I thought this was really well put. I have noticed an increase in anxiety in some of my psychotherapy patients recently around local/regional/national and global news as of late, as well as a concurrent feeling of powerlessness, and also the occasional awareness that the anxiety is linked to the notion that 'every one is fighting with each other about something'.

My friend with whom I used heroin, and who got clean a few years after me, is as close to being a brother as I have. He taught me how to use a camera and understand the fundamentals of photography, and he has been a close friend before/during, but most especially since I got clean in 2008.

He's a gun guy, he shoots competitively, and he does not like reactionary/frivolous gun control measures. His fears about progressive gun control overreach were exploited and he got sucked into the sphere of a certain former reality television show star. I remember those years being particularly strange because it seemed like a lot of people i knew would mention having friends who had voted one way and they'd cut off ties. "It was just too much" I remember people saying. While I find Former Reality Television Star DJT an abhorrent human being with no tact, I'm not going to jettison a friendship over it. It's just not that important to me. It was a little tricky in the years that followed, there was always an elephant in the room, but, over time it started to feel less significant.

CoVID was a huge wakeup call to him - I remember he came over during the first or second week of lockdown to see the apartment I'd just moved into. I remember how shook he was about the virus, and i was feeling strangely not that scared. I was certainly exercising due caution, but i worked in a health center, so I had a first had perspective on what was happening in real community medical settings. I also started to piece together pretty quickly that exposure dose seemed to be a big contributing factor to getting sick and getting sick really badly. I remember telling him my plan was to 'microdose virus' - that is, spend time in open air spaces that aren't too crowded, get low level exposure, and hopefully that would build up some natural immunity.. Towards the end of that afternoon, I remember him talking about it seemed so funny how much though I'd put into all of this stuff, yet, the person literally driving the car (Trump) seemed poorly equipped to have to deal with a real situation. It was from that point that my friend began to walk back from Trump's influence and didn't vote for him in 2020.

I often find it helpful to spend more time around people with different view points than I do, than the same. I feel like part of what has helped me navigate the stress of our current context is I spend time around people like my friend at that time, or my brother-in-law who is a cop. I feel like it's good to put myself in situations that are unfamiliar, and that helps me to realize that, as you mentioned, most of us are really interested in the same issues being addressed, and most of us would much rather we had younger presidential candidates this time around. People aren't a monolith, and we do ourselves a disservice by self-segregating into echo chambers that make it seem like they should be and must be.
 
in 2020 trump was all about banning tiktok.

today he's publicly against banning it.

as we're told he's a real straight shooter so you always know where he stands on issues. demonstrably false.

but why this flip flop?

could it be because he's not as rich as he'd like people to believe and he's desperately courting people for cash. people like jeff yass?

draw your own conclusions.

alasdair
 
Jack - just wanted to say that I thought this was really well put. I have noticed an increase in anxiety in some of my psychotherapy patients recently around local/regional/national and global news as of late, as well as a concurrent feeling of powerlessness, and also the occasional awareness that the anxiety is linked to the notion that 'every one is fighting with each other about something'.

My friend with whom I used heroin, and who got clean a few years after me, is as close to being a brother as I have. He taught me how to use a camera and understand the fundamentals of photography, and he has been a close friend before/during, but most especially since I got clean in 2008.

He's a gun guy, he shoots competitively, and he does not like reactionary/frivolous gun control measures. His fears about progressive gun control overreach were exploited and he got sucked into the sphere of a certain former reality television show star. I remember those years being particularly strange because it seemed like a lot of people i knew would mention having friends who had voted one way and they'd cut off ties. "It was just too much" I remember people saying. While I find Former Reality Television Star DJT an abhorrent human being with no tact, I'm not going to jettison a friendship over it. It's just not that important to me. It was a little tricky in the years that followed, there was always an elephant in the room, but, over time it started to feel less significant.

CoVID was a huge wakeup call to him - I remember he came over during the first or second week of lockdown to see the apartment I'd just moved into. I remember how shook he was about the virus, and i was feeling strangely not that scared. I was certainly exercising due caution, but i worked in a health center, so I had a first had perspective on what was happening in real community medical settings. I also started to piece together pretty quickly that exposure dose seemed to be a big contributing factor to getting sick and getting sick really badly. I remember telling him my plan was to 'microdose virus' - that is, spend time in open air spaces that aren't too crowded, get low level exposure, and hopefully that would build up some natural immunity.. Towards the end of that afternoon, I remember him talking about it seemed so funny how much though I'd put into all of this stuff, yet, the person literally driving the car (Trump) seemed poorly equipped to have to deal with a real situation. It was from that point that my friend began to walk back from Trump's influence and didn't vote for him in 2020.

I often find it helpful to spend more time around people with different view points than I do, than the same. I feel like part of what has helped me navigate the stress of our current context is I spend time around people like my friend at that time, or my brother-in-law who is a cop. I feel like it's good to put myself in situations that are unfamiliar, and that helps me to realize that, as you mentioned, most of us are really interested in the same issues being addressed, and most of us would much rather we had younger presidential candidates this time around. People aren't a monolith, and we do ourselves a disservice by self-segregating into echo chambers that make it seem like they should be and must be.

I think it depends on how extreme the political beliefs are personally. I’m generally not in favor of cutting someone out of my life because of their political orientation but there are definitely movements that, if a friend of mine threw themselves into enthusiastically, it would probably create distance between us at the very least.

It is really irritating how the stakes are portrayed nowadays. Even when I was a child and young adult, losing an election was never a good thing, it was a setback but at the same time there was the knowledge that you’d dust yourself off and get another crack at it in four years (or however long). Now both sides just go on and on with, VOTE FOR OUR TURD OR DEMOCRACY IS OVER FOR GOOD!!1!
 
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