If you look at my other comment, I’m not interested in destroying information, or preventing people from reading it.

IDK. This has big MAGA “own the libs” vibes. Not in the sense that it’s a politically conservative act, but in the sense that it’s a reactionary act of pointless antagonism.

Tim Cook will happily support someone who will stop him from adopting children or getting married if it means apples market share grows by 3%.

Exactly. As you note, rich people can usually buy their way around most anti-LGBT laws. Imagine you’re a billionaire or megacorp CEO. Consider your workarounds for various anti-LGBT laws. Imagine you’re such a person but happen to be gay and/or trans.

Gay marriage ban? Hire a team of lawyers to draft a series of contracts between you and your partner. Marriage imparts hundreds of protections and benefits, but most of those can also be achieved with a mountain of legal paperwork.

Laws criminalizing gay sex? You live on a giant private compound. How will cops even know what you’re doing in there? Even if they could, you can hire the best lawyers money can buy.

Restrictions on gender ID markers? Move your official residence to a state that affirms trans rights. For a passport, get a second or third passport in the form of a golden passport (one where you invest some large sum in a country in exchange for citizenship there.) Now you have a document for international travel with the correct gender marker on it.

Bans on trans medicine? Fly overseas for any medical treatment you need. If they really crack down on it, get treated with those injectable hormone pellets. Fly out of the country a few times a year to have your hormones topped off. Do any surgeries overseas as well.

Bathroom bans? Your limo has a toilet in it. Or you comply, use the restroom of your birth-assigned sex, and have your team of bodyguards guard the door while you do so. Or, more likely, you simply never go places where you would have to use a public restroom in the first place.

The hard truth is that most discriminatory laws can be bypassed or made irrelevant if you have enough cash.

There are simply very few discriminatory laws that can’t be bypassed with enough money. They’re not at risk until people actually start being sent to camps. And, as you note, they can easily jet off to a friendly country in the event of that ever happening.

You have to select “prime eligible” items. Are these penny ebooks included in the minimum purchase total?

Woah. Are we turning matchmakers into realtors with their own dating MLRS system? They could charge for their services not by a monthly fee, but by a commission of 6% of your wedding budget if you do find a match!

Have Egypt annex it?

All that would change is that now Israel periodically raids across the Egyptian border to attack Hamas forces in Gaza.

What is your proposal to stop creeping fascism? Because all you seem to want to do is nothing.

You’re mistaking “it took a long time to end Apartheid” with “we shouldn’t even try to end Apartheid.”

They very much did actually. Biden shamelessly just cribbed much of Elizabeth Warren’s economic policies. Hillary’s loss in 2016 forced him to run on a much more progressive platform in 2020 than he ever would have otherwise.

[CITATION NEEDED]

He’s had people involved in backroom negotiations for months. Yes, it is a dirty tactic. This has a lot of undertones of Reagan’s deal with the Iranians. He didn’t have great intentions in negotiating a ceasefire, but he did manage to do it. And Trump has shown a willingness in the past to hold US military aid as a stick to change the behavior of allies. It’s reasonable to think he did the same thing here.

The US DOES have substantial control over Israel. Reagan for instance dramatically affected Israel’s behavior by withholding weapons. Biden was more permissive of Israel than Reagan was.

I despise Trump, but I do not buy that argument for a second. You’re clearly taking a meaning that you’re inventing on your own, not from the text itself. “Let Israel go and finish it” could just as easily be interpreted as “they need to wrap this war up and reach a cease fire.”

Kamala called for a ceasefire, but her and Biden wouldn’t lift a pinky finger to actually produce such a cease fire. Trump seems to have actually succeeded at getting a ceasefire.

Voters weren’t expecting Biden to issue a complete trade embargo with Israel. What they were expecting was for Biden to FOLLOW US LAW and stop shipping arms to Israel, a country flagrantly violating law. There is a universe of possibilities between “stop sending Israel bombs on our dime” and “turn Israel into Cuba.”

Are Republicans going to stop being Fascist at any time in the foreseeable future? They ran a fascist in 2016, 2020, and 2024. And they have a long line of potential future candidates.

“Don’t hold them accountable while running against a fascist” == “never hold them accountable.”

And there’s no point in going after officers other than the president on this issue. It’s not like governors have much control over foreign policy.

They said the same thing about Apartheid South Africa. You think it was easy to cut ties with them? They were also tied into our military industrial complex.

And I find the argument “but it’s going to be haaard” despicable.

That part comes after, once democracy is assured.

When, precisely, did you expect that day to come?

A slightly bigger bomb won’t change anything materially on the ground in Gaza. The only significant change recently has been a cease fire. Whether it will hold or not is as yet unknown. But at least so far, Trump has somehow actually managed to be better on Gaza than Biden. Trump has shown a willingness to actually use the carrots and sticks of US foreign policy to produce outcomes. Biden offered unconditional support to Israel, while Trump seems to have forced them to come to the peace table by threatening to withhold support. In other words, Trump did what Biden’s base had been begging him to do for a year.

It’s possible all this falls apart. And it is possible that Trump will prove far worse, for example by allowing an annexation of the West Bank. But so far at least, Trump has actually been a lot better for the Palestinians than Biden. Biden and Harris fundamentally do not accept that Israel should ever be held accountable for anything.

I don’t think Trump did the cease fire out of moral concerns; I’m sure it was purely self-serving on his part. But he was actually willing to use the US’s various carrots and sticks to force through a cease fire agreement. That is something Biden never had the balls to do.

Refusing to hold Democrats accountable is also voting for Fascism. If your vote is 100% reliable to the Dems, they don’t have to do anything to win your vote. And thus, they can completely ignore you and everything you care about. The Dems have moved so far to the right that modern Republican Fascism doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to many people by comparison. After all, Democrats firmly embraced what was far-right immigration policy just a few years ago. Democrats have made a hard turn to the right. This has forced Republicans to move even further right into Fascism. And if things continue down this path, with Democrats never being held accountable, eventually both Democrats and Republicans will be overtly Fascist.

That is what happens if a party is never held accountable.

Where do you draw the line? The problem with “vote Blue no matter who” is that you give the Democrats more and more license to drift further and further right.

Kamala thought wrongly that she could completely abandon the progressive base. She fully embraced conservative positioning on Israel, the US border, and other issues. She ran a right wing campaign, compromising issue after issue to appeal to centrist Republicans.

Kamala’s degeneracy was only possible because of the attitude you espouse. Because as long as progressives are willing to “vote Blue no matter who,” there is nothing to prevent Democrats from drifting ever-further to the right.

The modern political landscape exists precisely because of the fact that for decades, progressives have been voting “Blue no matter who.” Democrats haven’t had to work hard to secure their base; they’ve taken them for granted. This has allowed Democrats to slip further to the right. As Democrats have slipped further right, Republicans have responded by moving into outright Fascism.

You are unwilling to ever hold Democrats accountable. And by doing so, you guarantee that eventually the presidential race will be “KKK vs neo-Nazis,” as Democrats themselves drift into Fascism.

I voted for Kamala, but you have to be pretty dense to think that there is any meaningful difference between how Kamala and Trump would have handled Palestine. They’re both full-on Zionists. Giving them some bigger bombs won’t change things much. They already flatten entire neighborhoods at a whim.

If two candidates will likely both be abominable on an issue you care about, you might as well vote to hold the one representing the party that has already committed genocide accountable.

I’m just amazed that there’s apparently a middle-aged white guy in the Bloods.

It’s what I call the Rapiscan systems

https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/

I just call them the rape scanners.