[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 25 points 6 hours ago

You made me check to see if Dick Cheney is still alive.

He is, and he has 2 DWIs, and he got 5 draft deferments during the Vietnam War and said about it "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 5 points 8 hours ago

"Well as long as they're working full time while inside, at least they can use that to pay for incarceration. It actually does seem fair that they need to be working instead of literally just sitting around, and then that can pay for their right to continue to exist."

"Okay, so we could do that, but also, hear me out for a second"

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 2 points 9 hours ago

Chin up boyo! You said you were gonna keep doing this all the way until the election. That's like 6 more months, you can't get all downhearted about it already just about some messages explaining why this one was bullshit too.

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 41 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

He constructed it a little cleverly: Said that if it was a Republican, they'd be in the electric chair. I don't think it was criminal.

Of course, he also openly tried to have his own vice president killed, and collects non-murder-related felonies like bottles for recycling, and at least so far all of that has been mostly okay of him to do, so I'm not sure how much it matters. 😕

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 7 points 10 hours ago

Quick question, who's "we"? Pretty much everyone I see use the term "blue MAGA" seems to mean by it, all the Democrats.

Or are you saying the Democrats as a whole are cult-like just as much as Trump's MAGA?

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 6 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Back in the Clinton/Bush era 20 years ago when he said that, I actually think it made quite a bit of sense. The Democrats were a lot more corporate-friendly (dropping corporate tax instead of raising it like Biden did, boosting the WTO instead of telling them to go fuck themselves like Biden did), and the Republicans weren't trying to kill their political opponents or put minority groups into literal concentration camps.

I'm not even gonna comment on "'they' keep scrubbing it from YouTube."

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 12 points 12 hours ago

I sorta had a feeling you wouldn't make even the slightest effort to defend that bullshit you had said.

politicians are not your friends

No, politicians are not at all your friends. What you mean when you say "support" for Biden or that Biden betrayed us, or that thing shills sometimes say about "falling in line behind" the Democrats and how they don't want to do it, is very weird to me.

Nobody in politics is your friend. The government is just a big, corrupt, very dangerous machine. It runs on money and propaganda and defense contractors, and sometimes good things come out of it and sometimes bad things, and Biden is one little cog in that machine. That's why I'm comfortable saying good things that Biden did, or that he's doing a very bad thing by enabling a genocide -- I'm not viewing either of those as a statement of my "allegiance." It's just, like, hey I am a free person and here is how I am viewing the world and what the truth is.

Ralph Nader did an excellent interview talking about productive ways to push the Democrats to the left, and how upset he was at Democratic voters who were throwing away an opportunity to get some concessions from the Biden administration in exchange for their vote. His viewpoint makes a ton of sense to me.

Your viewpoint -- sort of based on emotion, this sort of teenager mentality like "YOU'RE DEAD TO ME NOW I'LL CALL UNCLE TRUMP TO COME OVER AND BURN THE HOUSE DOWN BECAUSE WHO CARES YOU BROKE MY HEART" coupled with a lot of the sins you're accusing him of actually being things he didn't do, is just weird. Like, if you want to push Biden left, fuckin go for it man. Sounds great. But if you've decided that if Trump comes to power and nukes Iran and makes being gay illegal and puts all the Hispanics in camps and cancels the next election, that's just the price the country will pay because Biden said this wrong thing about racism and it was so hurtful to you and he's definitely a bad person and that good person / bad person is even relevant to how to vote, then okay sure. I won't tell you not to. But I don't think you should pretend that I'm the one treating my politicians in a strange parasocial non sensible way.

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 15 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I don't think you're a Trumper/Republican because you don't support Genocide Joe. I think you're a Trumper/Republican because the way you don't support him doesn't make any fucking sense. You criticize him for things he objectively didn't do, and you offer no particular solutions that would seem to lead to a better outcome for those of us who live in the US and want it to do less killing here and abroad, and the only solution that you seem to offer -- refusing to vote for him and offering an endless drumbeat of propaganda about him -- has an excellent possibility of leading to a catastrophically worse outcome for everyone. Including Palestinians. And, you're so vocal and consistent in criticizing him -- and only him -- for such a big variety of things real and imagined that it's hard for me to take away any possible conclusion than that you're trying to make sure he doesn't get elected.

It's possible that you're simply a very confused leftist. IDK. But that's my take on it. I note, also, that the story linked to also explicitly contradicts the headline, in terms of when students left ("walked out") from the ceremony:

Several students walked out of the graduation ceremony while Biden was presented with an honorary degree following his speech, CNN reported.

So they stayed to listen to him speak, and then walked out in protest when he was done speaking? This is impossible, to me, to read as anything other than a deliberate propaganda construction built on people leaving to go to the bathroom or something. IDK, maybe I'm missing something.

(Edit: Also, when I said the protestors were awesome and it's good that they let them protest, because it's a message Biden needs to hear because he is wrong, and then you immediately pretended that I had said the opposite and started lecturing me about how legitimate it is to disagree with Biden, I honestly didn't even notice because I'm sorta numb to that kind of thing at this point.)

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 11 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Hey, quick question unrelated to that obviously insane thing you just said: You posted a while back about how upset you were Joe Biden betrayed everyone, after he promised to decriminalize marijuana, and then didn't do it even though he could literally do it at any time he wanted and that's just one more example of him being shit. I listed out the things he had done (basically: federal pardons for possession, telling the DEA to reschedule it, and putting a decriminalization bill through congress), and then I asked you what else you would like him to do.

I think your post got removed as misinformation right after that, so I never got a chance to hear the answer. What else was it that you wanted him to do? That he could do literally any time, that you were upset that he betrayed everyone who voted for him by not doing?

Surely, since your goal is to push Biden left, not to just oppose him at every turn and make sure he doesn't get elected, you are interested in non-propaganda information and discussion on topics like this.

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 18 points 13 hours ago

Don't forget, he also has a photo of 2 students facing away from Joe Biden and all the rest sitting facing the normal direction

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 24 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Good for them. They're standing up for what they believe in, and I agree with them, and I definitely think that this type of thing has some impact on Biden's policies. Although at this rate, all the Palestinians will be dead before he works his way slowly and gradually around to the idea that maybe he'll have to do more than a sternly worded phone call with Netanyahu in order for the killing to stop.

You'll note that, because Biden bears little resemblance to the monstrous authoritarian caricature you try several times a day to paint him as, he and the college (who I'm sure talked with him about this exact issue, beforehand) both made no effort to "crack down" on them, and in fact he explicitly called out their protest as a good thing, during his speech.

(My point wasn't that the headline was a direct lie, but an example of engineering a single true fact by blowing it up and warping it to create a slanted picture of reality in the reader's mind. That's why I sent the full unedited video, as a way of contrasting it with a single event or a single picture taken from the perfect angle. I actually can't visit X video links since Elon fucked things up, but if you want to send me some non-X videos I'm happy to take a look at those, too.)

(Edit: Actually, I think the thing that they walked out as he gave his speech might be an actual lie. According to The New York Post, which seems to be the source for ozma's photo, it sounds to me like the students who left stayed through Biden's speech and then left during a later part when he was still on stage.)

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 33 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Lessons in headline engineering

Another possible headline was "At Morehouse, Biden says dissent should be heard because democracy is 'still the way'" or another "Biden tells Morehouse graduates that scenes in Gaza from the Israel-Hamas war break his heart, too"

Outside of the ceremony, a small number of protestors gathered while the commencement itself did not see any major disruptions.

Last week, Morehouse College President David Thomas said he would rather halt proceedings than have students escorted away for protesting.

"If my choice is 20 people being arrested on national TV on the Morehouse campus, taken away in zip ties during our commencement, before we would reach that point, I would conclude the ceremony," he said on NPR's Weekend Edition.

But, none of that happened -- either halting the ceremony or tackling or pepper spraying any of the people who were draped in Palestinian flags or turning their chairs around.

DeAngelo Fletcher, Morehouse College's valedictorian, closed his address to his classmates by addressing global conflict, particularly the Israel-Hamas war.

"For the first time in our lives, we've heard the global community sing one harmonious song that transcends language and culture," he said. "It is my sense as a Morehouse Man, nay – as a human being – to call for an immediate and a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip."

IDK how much more pro Palestinian than that he got, and it sorta sounds like "both sides." But whatever. Anyway apparently Biden stood up and shook his hand after. Here's the whole video; Biden's part starts at around 1:43:30. Comparing the tenor of the thing if you take a look at it firsthand, against the tenor that's created from reading this particular headline, is a good little window on what they were trying to do by writing the headline that way (i.e. not to inform about what happened), and what ozma was trying to do by posting it here.

I don't actually think it matters all that much what anybody says about Gaza. Biden stopping the weapons shipments, pushing for an immediate cease fire and humanitarian aid, and supporting an ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu would be a good start. I think mostly this commencement speech is notable in that, hey look, (1) there was protest and it was ok (2) you can make things sound way different depending on which aspects you present in the media coverage.

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TL;DR:

  • Russians have pushed several km past the northern border
  • Not nearly enough Russian troops committed for a successful attack on Kharkiv, but that still seems to be their plan
  • Lots of mechanized units coming across the border and getting drone-striked
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Excerpts of interest:

Mr Shoigu has close links with President Putin, often taking him on fishing trips in his native Siberia.

He was given the defence portfolio despite having no military background, which rankled with some of his top brass.

A civil engineer by profession, Mr Shoigu rose to prominence as the head of the emergencies and disaster relief ministry in the 1990s.

He often looked out of his depth as defence minister, especially after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.

Prigozhin, who led a short-lived mutiny against Moscow, accused Mr Shoigu of being a "dirtbag" and "elderly clown" in audio messages that went viral.

Mr Shoigu's suggested replacement, Mr Belousov, is an economist with little military experience.

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