Red Hat 4, father say me down on one of his Frankenstein computers built out of his trash heap in our basement and told me to have fun. I found tux racing konquest and played the shit out of them

Same reason people are pissed at Biden for every handling of <insert problem here> that 100% falls within the domain of another governmental branch. Currently the executive branch is sorta Atlasing our entire government which requires them to severely overreach their powers opening them up to checks and balances by the other highly sabotaged branches that both seemingly wish to force our entire government to accomplish nothing. The most publicized example of this is three student loan forgiveness package that Biden's administration tried to pass that got blocked, though there are lots of other examples.

The reality is that the executive branch as a whole has very little long term reach and we need to be pressuring Congress to do literally anything at all. The only time I'm going to look at Biden and say "this is his fault" is when I see Congress pass a bill doing something like sending an aid package to Gaza and/or Ukraine, only to have him refuse to sign. Which I suspect he'd actually just sign something like that through. We'll never know for sure because two of our federal branches are too busy playing something vaguely resembling a game of football where the ball is a 50 lb boulder and everyone's screaming that they keep subbing their toes on on it.

One of the biggest downsides of a VPN; you share an exit node with lots of other people, only takes one bad actor to get your exit node ip banned

I wish I had been born in Denmark or Norway - at least their social democratic safety nets would allow my community to thrive as the world burns around us

I feel this in my soul.

Yes. That's a question that has been raised by the US department of state that we might see an answer to in our life times of we're lucky.

I was mostly using unverified in lacking sources and people not going through and verifying their sources before just blindly believing them. Which seems to happen a lot.

People see Biden did something and don't look into why Biden did the thing he did then start calling him every because he did the thing he did without understanding why he did it. It's a vicious circular loop that I've seen with pretty much every president we've had since I can remember.

Biden seems to be pretty conscious about remaining within the bounds of law so there's a good chance there's generally some obscure treaty or other random grouping of legal documents that when all bundled together cause the reaction we see. I like to look up what those are because I find it interesting but I can guarantee the bulk of people in this thread do not.

We're not bound to sell weapons but we're bound to provide aid by a combination of Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement (1952) which I can't find the text of from my phone... Need to wait till I'm near a computer to try again and Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (1991) which I linked elsewhere in the thread.

https://www.dsca.mil/programs/excess-defense-articles-eda Does explicitly allow the sale of arms to a list of nations from my understanding. This is a huge rabbit hole of laws and then exceptions to laws.

whether I personally agree any of this is right is a different story here

The ways to remedy a bilateral defense agreement depending on the actual agreement (I'm having trouble finding any of the us-isreal ones... So I'm just making assumptions here) usually boil down to supplying military aid or providing military defense.

Essentially the us must deploy supplies or a defense force. I'll keep digging for the actual text of one of these treaties but it might take a bit because the US state departments site is actually just really badly organized.

Summary of our obligations from the state department https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-israel/

The two that apply here are that arms can be dispersed with only congressional notification and that we're have multiple bilateral defense agreements with them.

Hamas issued an attack on Israel which triggered the bilateral defense agreements and one way to remedy would be to deploy supplies to the region with congressional notification.

Just imagine the damage to the region if we took bilateral defense to it's logical conclusion and dispatched actual military aid.

This is not Biden "going around Congress". This is Congress explicitly granting permission in advance to do it as long as they are notified.

(Worth noting I've never looked this deeply into this before so I'm learning about this clown fiesta as well. It goes pretty deep...)

That's only a subsection of our obligations. Two paragraphs up are what I was actually talking about. We have multiple bilateral defense agreements with them which essentially boils down to an attack on me must me treated as an attack on you.

Ah you are correct. They are a non-nato ally as they are out of geographical scope.

https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-israel/#:~:text=Israel has been designated as,relationship with the United States.

This world be applicable though.

It's the NATO agreement. https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/stock_publications/20120822_nato_treaty_en_light_2009.pdf

Article 5 is the one that got invoked by the Hamas attack

As stated in another thread, at this point Biden has done enough to cover against any legal retaliation however, and 100% command a withdrawal of US support as Israel has actually been using the supplies to commit war crimes

The best way to think of it is that the presidents power is roughly bellcurved relative to how much Congress is in alignment with them. If Congress is completely out of alignment with them they have very little power because congress can pass a vote on what he vetos or issue a stop on any executive action he takes. If Congress is slightly in alignment or out of alignment he becomes able to singlehandedly stop laws and executive actions aren't likely to get overruled and will have up go under judicial review. If Congress is completely in alignment with him, he doesn't need to use his veto powers or executive actions and if he does they likely won't be contested anyway but we're generally better off with Congress passing a law.

Cool, sounds good to me. Thanks again, I was finding myself eagerly anticipating your responses because I was definitely learning some new things about why people dislike his handling of the Gaza genocides. You've made some really good points. I think he's made a good enough case at this point that NATO is no longer applicable in the case of genocide. At least with to protect him from retaliation if he did command a stop of US support to a NATO ally.

There's no congressional approval needed as he is driven by treaty to provide arms, if anything he is compelled by Congress to send arms as long as Israel is at war as a US ally due to NATO.

He's trying to make the argument that Israel committing genocide with those arms is reason to withdraw support, unfortunately the US government moves at a glacial pace on it's best day to the point that the US military is actually somehow faster. Given the number of Democrats that do support Israel, its entirely realistic that he could get successfully impeached if he failed to comply.

Anyway... Thanks for the civil debate but work is starting so I need to go, I'll read your next message bit I probably won't have time to reply.

He actually is in the case that the initial arms shipment was sent, Israel was attacked by Hamas and he had to respond by sending aid. He has gone on record stating that the current war crimes Israel has been committing raise question of the legality of providing further support.

Obviously still remains to be seen if anything will actually come of that though. Words are cheap.

I see, so essentially they would state that it was in defense of the United States because it is was onshore and is there's nothing Congress could do about it.

That's actually really horrifying if someone like trump takes the presidency given his current threats...

Biden is legally obligated by treaty to provide Israel with arms. Not doing so would give those maniacs in the house actual reason to impeach

Biden is legally obligated by treaty to provide Israel with arms. Not doing so would give those maniacs in the house actual reason to impeach

I think you may be shadowbanned or something? Everything you post gets automatically deleted for me.

Only with clearance from Congress though. I actually did not realize that Israel's president did not serve as cic.

That's actually sorta that joke, the US president is roughly as capable of commiting genocide as the president of Israel.

As for misspelling his name... Thanks Google? I'll fix it.

Which the joke was probably not well delivered as it would probably have flown over that other guys head anyway...

Current president of Israel

I can't disagree with the age argument, these dinosaurs need to step aside and let the world change.

I do want to know what exactly Biden has genocided. The two groups in this world who are driving genocides are Putin's and Netanyahu's regimes. Biden has no control over them, and the only group that could enact a foreign policy to do anything here in the US is Congress. So if anyone is complicit in that, it's our "Currently Genocidal by Inaction Congress."

I get it though, doesn't roll as nicely off the tongue.

[Edit: a poster below pointed out that my joke was bad and I should feel bad. ]

Camilla was a poor choice at vp no matter how you swing it given the current progressive opinion on police.

Not just the media, but perhaps worse, unverified strangers on the Internet though social media. The biggest thing that pisses me off is every time I the lesser of two evils argument spouted of paired with Biden's handing of something that 100% should fall in the domain of Congress to solve. So may things that historically have been attributed to the President were ultimately created and decided on by Congress and the public attributes way more power to the President than they actually have because of it.

If we want actual support to Gaza we need to push our congressional members to provide that support. Which is laughable because congress can't even pass a bill that had bipartisan support because half of one floor bends knee to the will of a private citizen. Biden keeps having to overreach his office with executive orders and policies that aren't backed by law and as such are highly transient and subject to constitutional review allowing them too be thrown out, as well as peace time commander-in-chief powers to do things like supply airdrops or back door old equipment sales to their other countries to affected groups.

The difference between Ukraine and Gaza is that unlike Ukraine, have does not have a unified Palestinian force that the US can safely supply arms to (HAMAS has actively proven that they are not the good guys) and that we're legally obligated to supply arms to Israel, which we are not to Russia. Biden can only sit loudly at Israel stating that genocide is bad threaten that this could lead to a withdrawal of US support, but he can't actually withdraw US support. Congress needs to provide a bill for him to sign that does that.

On a side note... I'm fairly convinced that a good chunk of the rhetoric spouted to not vote for Biden likely originated from foreign sources to plant the Idea in people's minds and get them to repeat it everywhere because on the surface it feels right. The vote any vote not for Biden is a vote for Trump rhetoric probably exists for similar reasons, mostly to help reinforce the thought that both sides are the same because it's quite easily proven not true and likely increases the odds that someone it's used to convince to vote for Biden ultimately ends up either withholding their vote in protest or voting for someone else out of spite.

This is true. The fact that I can be irrationally angry about something Biden and his administration has done and still find thing to agree on is fine. I fully intend to vote for him anyway. I wouldn't be so quick to just call him an evil, at worst he's like a chaotic neutral. There is very little I can find to agree on with the current, highly regressive, Republican party and the few remaining individuals who have at redeeming features are all being driven out. This is horrible and effectively gives anyone save one option and it's the scariest thing about all of this.

You get to vote for something rooted in reality or a bunch of lunatics living in a made up fantasy land.

I didn't see that he'd done this, and now that you mention it he definitely did do something similar with Ukraine at first. Kinda makes me irrationally angry [but I'm actually not sure how he'd show support to Palestine still since the Hamas are the only group that he could really use to do that and they're not exactly the good guys either... He did recently command the US military to air drop supplies], but unfortunately anything Trump would do is going to be much worse so now's not the time to try and stick it to the DNC as a wider group. Next cycle is going to be another good opportunity since they won't be able to just put forth Biden again.

Problem

How exactly is Biden even an evil? So much discourse around him complains about his handling of Gaza and Ukraine lately.

What do people actually want him to do?

Feels like so many people saying I don't want to vote for the lesser of two evils or I'm going to vote third party slept through civics class and think that the President can do things like unilaterally declare war or distribute aid package to other countries. That's now how the US government works. Congress is the one who creates those packages.

Here's what he can do, officially https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_the_president_of_the_United_States. I don't see much there that helps with any of the things people are complaining about. Pretty much any executive order he's tried to make has also been shot down by our current very useless Congress.

It's time to stop blaming the President for not doing the things he cannot do and start blaming our current Congress for being utterly useless. Get every obstructionist regressive Republican out of Congress and then we can blame Biden when we see him veto a bill that grants trans protections or aid to Ukraine and Palestine. Then we could call the man evil.

This is called agnosticism. It's great. If there is a god or God or gods it's not really "my" place to concern myself with them. There is no way to prove whether or not they exist. I was baptized as a child and i do not actually deny God (according to Christianity this is a cardinal sin) so by the tenants of Christianity if they are correct I'm eligible to go to heaven. Besides that I generally just aim to be an alright person doing outlandish things like treating others how I wish to be treated, and not stealing while sometimes volunteering at the local animal or homeless shelter.

If some pearl clutching Christian who pays lip service to God is going to get into heaven over me, I kinda don't want to go there anyway. I think I mostly stopped being a Christian because the sheer cognitive dissidence other Christians were causing for me with their actions was just too much for me to handle.

Mostly out of curiosity, what exactly makes Biden an evil in your mind? If it's the middle east what, exactly do you want him to do? The President doesn't possess the power to unilaterally declare war, all be can really do us shout at Israel to stop and strongly encourage Congress to do... Well anything at all.

What would make Biden a real evil, at least in my mind is if we had a functional legislative branch and he was vetoing every piece of aid they passed to those countries, or if he was overreaching with his executive orders to do things that blatantly belong to another branch of our government. Guess what Trump would do.

The only time the President really has much power is if they have a Congress that's aligned with their goals, and in the current cycle everything Biden has tried to do has been shot down by one of the other two braches. I suspect though, that if Congress passed an aid package to Ukraine or Palestine, Biden would not obstruct.

If it's because Bernie got shafted by the DNC and now we have Biden, I personally think given how our government works, Bernie can do way more good in the Senate than he could ever do as a president, and we need to load Congress up with as many people who idealistically align with him or at least, don't conflict and are willing to actually run our government.

Still has a lot of the same underlying issues discord has. It's not indexable being the biggest. The reality is that services like stack overflow or an issue tracker like bugzilla, or your local git services issues section or discussion section, hell even something like discourse or even mailing lists, just work better. If someone made an im service that could be indexed by search engines and the like, now we'd be talking. Opensorce design and discussion doesn't really benefit that much from closed ecosystems and end to end encryption in most cases.

I guess though at least with matrix someone could make a service that acts as a client and indexes content from a list of channels or something...

Discord, matrix, slack and telegram are where documentation goes to die in the current state of things though.

Without the Palestinians

It does certainly feel a bit like it's feeding into a stereotype.

Holy crap no. I'm saying Biden has been actively good (to my surprise, but I digress) and to not want to vote for him "being the lesser of two evils" shows a disconnect from reality on par with the current state of the Republican everything.

A huge chunk of that 'good' never coming to light is a combination of media just never talking about it, and conservatives and regressives in Congress actively blocking his efforts (the most well known instance of this being the student loan debt forgiveness)

This thread is about people who refuse to vote for biden because he is the lesser of two scrolls, my original point was that giving people retoric like "a vote not for Biden is a vote for Trump" is a bad faith argument, and using more grounded statements like "voting for Biden is the best way to ensure we don't get another term of Trump."

Meanwhile it's also with pointing out to the third party people who refuse to vote for Biden as the lesser of two evils that Biden is in fact not even an evil, and that he actively tried to do a lot of good. If we can stack congress with same congress people who have better things to given than people's genitals age bedrooms and some decent bills make their way across his desk, he's probably not going to veto them.

Some of the people using this argument are probably Bernie bros who are butthurt over Bernie stepping down in 2020 and the DNCs antics back in 2016. It's probably worth mentioning that right now Bernie can do a lot more good in the Senate than he can in the oval office, since we have a president who wouldn't block his policies. If Trump or Haley get into office that's not going to be the case and refusing to vote for Biden over that hurts their favorite politicians agenda a lot.

Sorry for the double post, but I forgot to mention that the above statement is a much better argument AND is mathematically provable using the same method I used above (any vote not for candidate A becomes a -1 or a -2.)

It's a much better statement to use when trying to sway voter opinion.

Also definitely the more important point I'm making above is that Biden is NOT the lesser of two evils. The moves he's made have not been the biggest or the best but a lot of that's in part because he needs a solid base of good Congress people working alongside him to accomplish any real progress on any of the initiatives he's been pushing. The President does not make laws, though having the correct President in office does lower the bar at getting good laws passed. If a good law never crosses his desk because we have a bunch of regressives in office like we currently do, not a lot it's going to happen.

On a tangentially related note, you ever find it odd how illegal immigrants simultaneously take everyone's jobs and are lazy sacks of shit benefitting off welfare?

I've seen a lot of regressives happily tout similar retoric back to back and it just astounds me at the mental gymnastics.

A secondary goal is to convince people who are on the fence about voting for trump to vote for literally anyone else.

Oh good, it's this argument again. I've really never heard a statement that is more damaging to a conversation with an intent to sway votership than this one.

A vote for candidate C is not a vote for candidate B, but for the sake of the argument let's assume it is. It's possible to model an election using game theory, and it can be done in a few different ways. First I'm going to try is a 1 dimensional approach from the perspective of candidate A. A vote for candidate A is worth 1 point. A vote for candidate B is worth -1 point. A vote for any other candidate is worth 0 points. This is actually a fairly accurate model of how a winner takes all election system works. I'll also play it from candidate B's perspective to illustrate something.

There are 300 votes for candidate A There are 340 votes for candidate B There are 20 votes for candidate C from constituents who claim to be from party A There are 60 votes for candidate C from constituents who claim to be from party b

Candidate A: -40 Candidate B: 40

Interestingly, people who voted for candidate C do not show up in the final results at all and they hurt/helped each candidate equally. The only people whose votes actually had any real bearing on the election in this model were the people who turned out to vote for candidates A and B. I'll let people draw their own conclusions from this thought experiment.

The real argument to make here however is that Biden is not the lesser of two evils and has in fact done a lot of good for the country in his term, or at least attempted to. The more important thing then voting for Biden is that people show up with an intent to put as many good senators and representatives in office as possible each election until we can get enough people in office to allow them presidential agenda to actually be able to do anything. Also to vote in your local elections for similar reasons.

Some actually notable percentage is probably also older conservative Somali men bringing their wives and voting age daughters and standing over them at the bottom booth. I shit you not, the last election I worked had at least 5 of those come in and sit there repeatedly calling the machine judges over repeatedly asking us who the Republican candidate was so they could instruct their families how to vote. You're not supposed to watch what someone else is polling, but we also aren't equipped or staffed to handle someone doing that shit.