darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]

I can see it now. Trump calls in gravy team 6 to break him out, they kill a ton of cops in a firefight while rescuing him, once back at the white house he drone strikes the judge and prosecutor responsible and he spends the next couple years vindictively attacking Democrats and their prosecutors and dismantling the justice department while battering the hell out of NY with federal antagonism that’s not really legal further pushing the idea of a breakup of the states into the mainstream. Democrats promise to jail him after he leaves office but he dies days before the election after finishing a Big Mac for dinner and Vance issues a sweeping pardon for Trump’s family and associates for all activities to which Democrats tut tut but have to respect the institutions and so go on to face-plant in the next election as well despite it being “the most important election of our lives”.

Well I should point out I could easily see between high hundreds of thousands and over a million Trump people simply dying because A) a lot of them are old B) Covid which they deny and had 4 years to die from it.

I could also see a million or so being disillusioned with Trump, either Q people who thought he’d do different or people who saw something else in him that he didn’t live up in his new campaigning. Also a lot easier to just check the box to re-elect the president for a certain amount of Americans who may not even be consistent Republicans but just people who thought he did a good enough job giving them free money during Covid and deserved to continue. So those numbers are if anything low and suggest IMO he probably gained some voters as well between losing people to dying and disillusionment and such.

So then the discussion must go towards those Democratic voters, they must have really alienated them, they must have really lost the enthusiasm and angered them. Sure we can discount a couple million as racists who voted for Biden because he was a white man with ties to anti-busing and crime legislation and KKK leadership but not nearly all of them. There’s still a significant chunk, millions and millions you have to account for.

Where I live they’d own Albertsons, Food 4 Less, Ralphs, Vons, pretty much everything except Target, Walmart, Whole Foods/Amazon Fresh, and some smaller and specialty grocers like Aldi/Trader Joes.

Also, last I checked, there are two Aldi corporations (Aldi sud/Aldi nord), one of them owns Trader Joes, the other one runs US Aldi stores, they’re not the same entity (though there is a history there) and though they often seen to share a fraction of product ideas I can say the same product at the two stores are often noticeably different and almost certainly made by different suppliers.

No they couldn’t have. Several people quit, they cried about Bezos blocking them from endorsing Kamala, other news outlets reported it.

All Bezos could have done in that situation would have been to say nothing but people would absolutely have been the wiser about it being blocked by him and they’d probably lose as many subscriptions as from this. I doubt his statement wins or loses him any meaningful number of subscribers, it’s just cover so he doesn’t have to come out and say actually he’d rather stay on Trump’s good side in case he wins and/or maybe he thinks Trump is better for his interests but of course would prefer associating with someone so uncouth.

Any links to this actual interview to save for later?

They’re claiming onions.

Where? Not in the 2 minute segment I saw linked above.

That was just a polite “let me finish and here’s what I mean”. Not like he spent 2 minutes quickly eviscerating the foundation’s of the man’s belief. Not like he left them speechless. I’ve seen people eviscerated in debates or curbstomped if you like and this wasn’t it. He wasn’t left sputtering or angry or flustered or flailing, he just calmly moved the conversation on after injecting a nice neutralizing “not okay for Jews to have ethno-states what about Muslims” with the pre-supposed, pre-programmed context for that for the viewer being that Hasbara says nearly all Muslim majority states are the same as Israel just for Muslims therefore they’re just carving out their own little spot and then they go on this diatribe about Muslims kicking out the Jews and they must give them back their lands and now you’re bogged down into this ridiculous historical revisionist conversation with them. He let that go by allowing the assumption it was true and condemning it and going on a “I condemn all death penalty, regardless of reason”. So he accepted the premise, he validated it by not throwing it out and staked his argument on liberal ground which is weak and ever-shifting.

Honestly I’m just angry after seeing that clip above because it’s the most boring lib-shit objections imaginable and the people on the other side, excuse me the fascist monsters on the other side are just kind of pushing back because they reject the premise, they reject the premise that they should care about apartheid or that these particular Jews don’t have a particular special license to break laws and do crimes, they don’t feel any shame, they don’t feel any reflection, they feel that those people were entitled to that land and fighting back makes the Palestinians the bad guys, you have to hit hard with very eloquently delivered language and metaphors to break through that shameless white supremacist entitlement and he didn’t hit hard enough in the clip.

And probably for the best he didn’t curbstomp them. If he did and he delivered a shining few nuggets of truth he’d be blacklisted from all western mainstream media quick as snap your fingers. He’d be castigated and slandered and deplatformed and so on just like Finkelstein and no defense, no matter how tight it is would matter. Because the job of these people is to present a false narrative, the idea of balanced discussion that involves “both sides” being represented but one side is only allowed a stunted, abridged, lousy version of its facts and truth while the other is allowed endless lies.

It’s not practical. I looked into it once on a related matter and unless you’re a US state dept employee or member of the military, the fees and taxes on importing and registering a car bought outside the US are astronomically high, like the cost of the car all over again, tens of thousands of dollars. The US has very specific and nit-picky safety standards. It’s not a matter of meet or exceed, it’s a matter of meet and don’t exceed the limits imposed by law or regulation so you can’t buy and bring over a European car that has better safety features if they don’t meet US standards, so in that case you have to pay a specialty mechanic to adapt your car to US standards. And even if the standards are met exactly there are huge taxes and fees on it to discourage people importing cheaper cars. This is not the first US rodeo with protectionism for US car companies, they did this whole thing with Japan in the 90s and the Japanese eventually just did bulk importing and then later set up US plants for making the cars to get even lower costs.

Those for whom it might be practical would represent a few hundred thousand, maybe a million or two people who live very close to the Mexico border and don’t just not registering in the US and dealing with the Mexican paperwork regularly.