The US will begin air dropping food aid to the people of Gaza, President Joe Biden announced on Friday, as the humanitarian crisis deepens and Israel continues to resist opening additional land crossings to allow more assistance into the war-torn strip.
Speaking in the Oval Office, Biden said the US would be “pulling out every stop” to get additional aid into Gaza, which has been under heavy bombardment by Israel since the October 7 Hamas terror attacks.
“Aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough,” the US President said, noting “hundreds of trucks” should be entering the enclave.
Biden said the US is “going to insist that Israel facilitate more trucks and more routes to get more and more people the help they need, no excuses”.
He also noted the efforts to broker a deal to free the hostages and secure an “immediate ceasefire” that would allow additional aid in.
When Biden ran in 2020, this was the argument I heard from Biden supporters: sure, Biden may not be perfect, but we should support him anyway, and then, once he gets elected, we’ll hold his feet to the fire.
Yet now, when people try to hold his feet to the fire, they’re accused of supporting Trump. Funny how that works.
My argument is: Biden may not be perfect, but he’s a whole hell of a lot better than the guy that tried to start an insurrection and appointed a Supreme Court justice that got rid of Roe v. Wade. Holding his feet to the fire is a waste of time because the house always wins; the People will be the ones to bear the burden of any sort of loss for the Democrats. All I can do is hope that people will finally be pushed too far and revolt against the government, but that will be a whole hell of a lot harder if the 1st and 2nd Amendments are infringed on any more than they already are.
So essentially, shock doctrine. “This is bad, but it could be worse”.
More like “This is bad, but the only other remotely probable outcome is worse.”
Revolting against the government is far less feasible (and far more ethical) than simply voting for an alternative party.
1996 had the lowest recorded percentage of voter turnout in the past century, at 51.7%. Assuming there’s currently about 250 million eligible voters in the US, that is equivalent to about 129 million voters.
Imagine you were a wizard and could force everyone on Lemmy to vote for a single third-party candidate. Also assume every account on every instance of Lemmy is a US citizen capable of voting. Lemmy has about 421 thousand users. Even if each account on Lemmy could magically convince 50 other eligible voters to vote for the same independent candidate, that would only amount to about 21 million votes, or about 16.3% of all votes in the election going towards that candidate.
Voting in an independent party is nothing short of impossible in the US.
What does Lemmy have to do with it? I never brought up Lemmy!
My point is that the numbers are so unbelievably stacked against a third party winning that you’re not achieving anything by voting for a third party.