You know what he said: I’m not saying they’re eating cats and dogs, I’m just repeating what was reported. I also might have a bridge to sell, if you’re interested. Or a $100,000 watch that’s a complete kitsch.

I’ll not take sides this time. I already told you that he’s going to win, despite becoming increasingly incoherent and disconnected from reality. I just want to mention two articles I ran over by pure chance. They seem kinda worth reading, but I’ll only quote fragments of them, without further comments. They’re both written by Jacob Weindling, who also wrote ✍️ George Orwell Was a Socialist, You Colossal Idiots.

These articles include tweets with text, photos and videos, so please fucking disable the “anti-spy” features in your browser. Nobody fucking cares about you. You’re a number to advertisers (a hash, actually), and you’re nobody to the Establishment. Hopefully you’re not a terrorist, a pedophile, or a drug dealer. It’s like participating in public demonstrations with a t-shirt that reads “FUCK THE GOVERNMENT!” but refusing to say who you voted for, “because the vote is secret.” Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And your cojones are made of cotton wool.

From ✍️ Why I Am Begrudgingly Voting for Kamala Harris

I understand how this vote can seem contradictory to my well-established position that Kamala Harris has been part of an administration that has consciously fueled a genocide, and I don’t blame anyone for calling me a hypocrite because I sure feel like one casting it, but I also have come to accept that’s a natural consequence of being an American. In a perfect world, the Democratic Party would collapse into the dustbin of history where it belongs so it can make way for a new kind of political party that isn’t in thrall to soulless consultants and fundraisers who believe in nothing other than the next election cycle and whose entire reason to get up in the morning is so they can scam seniors out of their life savings. But if the last year has taught us anything, we live in the opposite of a perfect world.

I hate how many Democratic partisans take the posture of, “tough shit, it’s a binary system, so what choice do you have? We have to back the Dems no matter what.” This kind of flippant attitude is one of the big reasons the Democrats have been so successful shifting right, as their voters have been trained to treat compromise of any kind as a virtue unto itself while shaming anyone who doesn’t fall in line with whatever happens to be the party priority at the current moment. This is how you wind up with a situation where people who were decrying Trump’s immigration policies as unspeakably evil eight years ago are now echoing the Democratic Party’s stance that Trump’s immigration policies are now just common-sense bipartisan solutions while the Democratic presidential nominee criticizes Trump for not building enough border wall.

This is the hardest vote I have ever had to cast. I wrote “How Can You Vote for the People Committing a Genocide” to voice my fundamental concern around the morality of this choice. In that article, I wrote that I generally view voting as strategic pittance we are afforded as citizens of this “democracy,” and I don’t ascribe much of a moral value to my actions when I’m participating in our morally bankrupt system. But this is a bridge too far. The only thing that could push me back over it is a similar threat on the other side–and there is–one who is classifying you and me and everyone else who isn’t a part of his cult as the “enemy within” while waxing poetic about Hitler’s generals.

I also hate when liberals lecture people about the danger of Trump. If someone is being flippant about a second Trump presidency, sure, educate them. But we lived through one already, most people are well aware of what he is capable of and how seriously to take his vast array of authoritarian promises, and focusing solely on Trump has a way of giving a pass to the Biden-Harris administration’s horrific record.

What partisan liberals need to understand is that the Biden administration fueling Israel’s genocide of Palestine put Democrats on a level of evil at or above Trump in many people’s eyes, especially those with loved ones under Israel’s siege. The embrace of Trump’s immigration policy and the Dick Cheney bearhug does not make them look much, or any, better than the Republican Party to many others who remember the world before Trump distorted it. Doing idiotic things like this below does not help either. The Democrats are incompetent and deserve to lose to a bloviating game show host with his brain seeping out his ears.

So why am I voting for someone who is part of an administration that if I had my druthers, I would lock every person in it away in the Hague forever? Three reasons.

Trump Is Worse for the Left

Writing as someone with contacts in lefty movements, I can confirm that there is at least a level of consistent communication between activist groups and Democratic members of Congress and the executive branch. How effective it is, who knows, but we at least have a seat at the table in a way we never have before, and that seat is gone if Trump wins.

The left has made real progress. Don’t take this for granted. We got Joe freaking Biden to pass the most ambitious climate policy in American history and it’s working. A significant portion of the Democratic base is sympathetic to socialist ideas, more so than they are to capitalist ones according to a Data for Progress poll from 2022. I totally understand the burn-it-all-down feeling because this depraved fucking system deserves it, but that includes our victories too. The Democrats will shift right if they lose, that is clear as day from how they have run this election (just look at how willing the Dems were to step back and watch Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush get picked off by AIPAC). The left will be the biggest losers of a Trump presidency while Dick Cheney gets an office at the DNC.

As Naomi Klein noted, don’t ever assume that it cannot get worse.

The article includes a thread of tweets by Waleed Shahid. Then it goes on.

I Have a Duty to Protect Vulnerable People

Israel’s genocide of Gaza is and has been the biggest story in the world for the last year. I am a Jew who has never bought into this colonial vision of Israel, and the plight of the Palestinians has been at the forefront of my concerns. It still is as the genocide accelerates in the north and Israel expands its war to Lebanon–all enthusiastically backed by the United States only issuing tepid red lines they never planned to adhere to in the first place. I consider the Biden administration and his State Department and everyone in Congress who has voted to arm and enable Israel’s genocide an enemy of humanity.

But Trump is promising “a really violent day” in his bid to deport tens of millions of people from America. He has long been infatuated with our nuclear arsenal, so much so that he wanted to use it on a freaking hurricane. There are an endless line of hawks in D.C. lined up to encourage him to realize their half-century-long goal of waging war on Iran, and a Trump election would surely place the world the closest it has been to nuclear conflict since the Cold War. North Korea, who he wanted to nuke and blame someone else for it, entering the war in Ukraine, is another harrowing global development pointed towards Trump’s worst instincts.

Not to mention that all the smart money in the world is betting on Trump’s economic policies bringing us certain doom, and if you are a lefty who believes that economic malaise is at the root of fascism’s appeal, then fascism should only get more appealing to more people under a Trump-driven economic crash. He has already helped take away a women’s right to choose in America and would continue the fight to restrict the fundamental human rights of women, all while promising to use the military to put down protest movements against him. Hysteric #Resistance liberals are right about one thing: fascism is indeed at our doorstep.

Some may point out that I live in one of the 43 states that do not matter to the electoral college, which dramatically lessens the impact of my vote, but the popular vote is still important. Not because there is a value Harris can win by where Trump will accept that he has lost, but because Trump will claim he won the election no matter what, and the war after it is going to be fought partially in the court of public opinion where things like the popular vote will matter. Unless you live in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Georgia, your vote does not matter to this broken imperialistic system, but it still does to the people living underneath its boot.

This Isn’t a Democracy Anyway

If you think at this point that the United States is a genuine democracy, then I am sorry, but you are more naive than adults who still believe in Santa Claus. This has never been a democracy for, by and of the people. Women have had the right to vote for just 16 years longer than slavery existed as a legal institution in America.

America was founded as an aristocratic republic, a nation run by land-owning white men to rule over their subjects, a dynamic which still endures to this day. Socialists are fond of correctly saying there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and that applies to interacting with the largest government that is a wholly owned subsidiary of global capitalism too. Voting for either political party is a vote for an empire which has proven itself to be opposed to the overall progress of mankind, but voting for the Green Party is to be duped by a vanity candidate who floats in once every four years to pretend she’s some principled warrior while never building any lefty power in the intervening period.

In short, we’re fucked, so don’t put too much pressure on yourself for facing down the atrocious choices you have been presented.

The decision is between people who have done a genocide and a man who openly aspires to do more. This is the United States of America with its mask off. The Democrats are forever branded as the party of war criminals, and they are also the best that this sclerotic, decaying 18th century system built as a compromise between slave owners and slavery financiers has to offer its people. When you consider both how fundamentally and intentionally broken this all is, it becomes a lot easier to detach any moral value from your vote. That doesn’t change the fact that this vote rewards people who are authoring a genocide, but such is life in a collapsing empire.

I am voting for Kamala Harris because I want to protect the gains the left has made in the Biden era as well as the billions of people who are most under threat from Trump. Her participation in Israel’s genocide of Gaza is unforgivable and should appear at the top of her record forever.

⌛ INTERLUDE

On the ads telling women they “have a right to choose”
I’m sorry to say, but this really is representative of the average Republican IQ; stop claiming to the contrary! Also, Tucker Carlson was mauled by a demon.

Dennis Quaid, for whom Reagan was the best president in history and Trump the best in the 21st century. Full speech at Trump’s Rally in Coachella, CA – 10/12/24.

Arnold Schwarzenegger endorses Kamala Harris: ‘I will always be an American before I am a Republican’. Full tweet:

I don’t really do endorsements. I’m not shy about sharing my views, but I hate politics and don’t trust most politicians.

I also understand that people want to hear from me because I am not just a celebrity, I am a former Republican Governor.

My time as Governor taught me to love policy and ignore politics. I’m proud of the work I did to help clean up our air, create jobs, balance the budget, make the biggest infrastructure investment in state history, and take power from the politicians and give it back to the people when it comes to our redistricting process and our primaries in California.

That’s policy. It requires working with the other side, not insulting them to win your next election, and I know it isn’t sexy to most people, but I love it when I can help make people’s lives better with policies, like I still do through my institute at USC, where we fight for clean air and stripping the power from the politicians who rig the system against the people.

Let me be honest with you: I don’t like either party right now. My Republicans have forgotten the beauty of the free market, driven up deficits, and rejected election results. Democrats aren’t any better at dealing with deficits, and I worry about their local policies hurting our cities with increased crime.

It is probably not a surprise that I hate politics more than ever, which, if you are a normal person who isn’t addicted to this crap, you probably understand.

I want to tune out.

But I can’t. Because rejecting the results of an election is as un-American as it gets. To someone like me who talks to people all over the world and still knows America is the shining city on a hill, calling America is a trash can for the world is so unpatriotic, it makes me furious.

And I will always be an American before I am a Republican.

That’s why, this week, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

I’m sharing it with all of you because I think there are a lot of you who feel like I do. You don’t recognize our country. And you are right to be furious.

For decades, we’ve talked about the national debt. For decades, we’ve talked about comprehensive immigration reform that secures the border while fixing our broken immigration system. And Washington does nothing.

The problems just keep rolling, and we all keep getting angrier, because the only people that benefit from problems aren’t you, the people. The only people that benefit from this crap are the politicians who prefer having talking points to win elections to the public service that will make Americans’ lives better.

It is a just game to them. But it is life for my fellow Americans. We should be pissed!

But a candidate who won’t respect your vote unless it is for him, a candidate who will send his followers to storm the Capitol while he watches with a Diet Coke, a candidate who has shown no ability to work to pass any policy besides a tax cut that helped his donors and other rich people like me but helped no one else else, a candidate who thinks Americans who disagree with him are the bigger enemies than China, Russia, or North Korea – that won’t solve our problems.

It will just be four more years of bullshit with no results that makes us angrier and angrier, more divided, and more hateful.

We need to close the door on this chapter of American history, and I know that former President Trump won’t do that. He will divide, he will insult, he will find new ways to be more un-American than he already has been, and we, the people, will get nothing but more anger.

That’s enough reason for me to share my vote with all of you. I want to move forward as a country, and even though I have plenty of disagreements with their platform, I think the only way to do that is with Harris and Walz.

Vote this week. Turn the page and put this junk behind us.

And even if you disagree with me, vote, because that’s what we do as Americans.

From ✍️ Israel’s Final Solution for Gaza Is Here

This weekend I saw a group of Gazans gather around a child whose arms had been shredded so badly by gunfire that they did not know how to pick them up to rescue them. As people gathered to try to help, they were hit by an Israeli airstrike (Warning: Graphic video here). I am increasingly at a loss for printable words over this genocide, as every day a new horror is authored by Israel, all while American politicians and diplomats pretend they care about Palestinians when their actions prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they do not.

This is genocide. It’s ethnic cleansing. Anyone denying this at this point is no different from someone who denies that my relative died in Auschwitz.

Israel has restricted food and aid to north Gaza for 21 days and counting now, making it clear for even the thickest skulls dulled by Western and Israeli government propaganda that the starvation of the people being bombed and sent on death marches is intentional.

We have known for some time that Israel has designated “kill zones” in Gaza where they shoot on site and declare anyone shot a terrorist (well, people who read Israeli sources like Haaretz know this—American mainstream news consumers have been fed a different world, one that has mostly resembled the one Benjamin Netanyahu wants to portray). Israel is now effectively making all of northern Gaza one of these kill zones, forcing people out in a mass bombing campaign that massacres scores of people every single night as they escalate their violent attacks in the north. Israeli assaults have been so sadistic that there are now multiple reports that IDF soldiers are becoming demoralized by the horrors they are perpetrating on Gaza, calling into question whether they even have a fighting force capable of achieving their ambitions of invading and occupying parts of Lebanon.

Like Ronald Reagan calling Israel’s relentless bombing of Lebanon a “Holocaust” in 1982, I use the term Final Solution intentionally to get the attention of my fellow Jews still lost in the desert and worshipping a golden calf, because the intentional starvation of Gaza by Israel can only be interpreted as such.

Us Jews should know this as much as anyone given how many different oppressors we have faced throughout history. To believe that we cannot become like any other people in the world is to take the “chosen people” moniker to a disturbing point. A point that enables one to dehumanize others, and do to them what so many have done to us.

Which is genocide.

This is genocide, and no one in the United States government has any urgency to ameliorate the suffering of the Palestinian people. Years from now, when history makes it clear who the monsters of this age were, don’t forget who enabled and cheerlead this. North Gaza is on the brink of something truly horrific that there is no coming back from, and the powers that be have ensured that all we can do is watch.

As for The horror of rewatching BrainDead in an election year, this is exactly what I’m going to do, because I missed it back in 2016, so I’ll watch it now. Not my elections, anyway.