It’s not intended as a pejorative, so its perceived weakness is irrelevant.

It’s a precise term with a very specific definition in international law, and that’s the point.

Israeli terrorists have just taken 1500 Palestinian hostages.

In the sense in which you’re framing it, it would likely be more accurate to think of it as spectrums and subspectrums, in the same sense as sets and subsets.

But it’s been about six months since Schumer decided that it wasn’t the time for a fight, that neither he nor the country was ready. Democratic leaders have had six months to come up with a plan. If there’s a better plan than a shutdown, great. But if the plan is still nothing, then Democrats need new leaders.

We already know the Democrats need new leaders. Or more precisely, they need leaders, period.

Schumer and Jeffries aren’t leaders - they’re high-ranking tools.

That’s what they’ve demonstrated with their treatment of Mamdani. They hold the positions they hold because they have no principles and no integrity - because they’re owned by the donors and can be counted on to serve the interests of the donors regardless of any other considerations.

And for the time being at least, the donors - even the most generally leftist of them - aren’t sufficiently opposed to what Trump is doing. They’d probably rather the tyrants have [D]s after their names than [R]s, and they’re undoubtedly personally offended by Trump, since he’s petulant and gauche and gross, but they don’t have any particular opposition really to a program to benefit the wealthy few (which necessarily includes themselves) at the expense of the common people (which is just a bunch of shabby people they don’t know), so while they’d certainly welcome efforts to make Trump look bad, they’re not really committed to stopping him. And I guarantee that some significant number of them are already daydreaming about what they’ll be able to do if/when the power that Trump has accumulated falls into the hands of a Democrat.

And again - Schumer and Jeffries are their tools. We already see that with their refusal to support Mamdani.

And I have little doubt that we’ll continue to see it in their failure to meaningfully oppose Trump.

Huh… I should try that.

My standard response is to just leave the room.

The one that kills me - my brother does this - is framing it as a response to imaginary opponents.

He does these monologues about the libs or the woke mob or the city people or whoever in which he first mimics what they’re supposedly saying, then responds to it with some copy and paste bit of MAGA dogma.

He doesn’t even engage with actual people - it’s just the strawmen in his head.

Of course.

Even amidst the overt efforts to eatablish an authoritarian police state, this administration is most notable for being petty, vindictive and wantonly destructive. It’s as if even instituting neo-feudalistic/fascistic/plutocratic oligarchy is a secondary goal, and the primary goal is simply to be cruel, selfish, petulant and mean.

So of course those are the qualities one will find in its supporters. Most of them don’t even have a coherent ideology - all they have is hate and a petty and childish desire to make those they hate suffer.

Ahhh… imagine the truly epic temper tantrums she’s throwing…

By design.

This is a deliberate offensive in the class war the wealthy snd empowered few are already fighting, and that we’re losing by forfeit.

I am so fucking tired of this government of not simply the most corrupt, but the most stupidly corrupt.

The kakistocrat.

Best guess - is he so stupid he believes this or so dishonest he pretends?

Yes, he lies literally non-stop, so that’s always the safe bet, but with this tariff thing in particular, he seems to sincerely believe that they’re some kind of magic, and he fairly obviously has no idea how they actually work. So it seems at least possible that he genuinely believes this.

Which would take a special kind of stupid, but if there’s anyone capable of it, it’s Trump.

Where did I say that others do deserve to?

Yeah… somehow I can’t be arsed to care about the supposed threats to someone who oversees an army of masked thugs who black bag people and send them to concentration camps and foreign torture prisons.

Seems to me that if that’s the kind of world she wants, that’s the kind of world she, more than anyone else, should have to live in.

Do they think nobody remembers when they had politicians standing up in public and protesters trying to force their way onto a military base not only acknowledging tte sexual sbuse of Palestinian prisoners, but declaring that the soldiers somehow had the right to sexually abuse them?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2q07kd3ld6o

https://www.timesofisrael.com/bordering-on-anarchy-idf-chief-sounds-alarm-after-right-wing-mob-overruns-2nd-base/

I wouldn’t call them weak and ineffective. I’d call them corrupt and compromised.

They don’t roll over because they’re weak - they roll over because that’s what the donor class pays them to do.

It’s like you’re trying to excuse a child-murderer by pointing out that the victim’s dad is an asshole.

Israel is murdering Palestinians and stealing their rightful land.

No amount of diversionary finger-pointing will change those facts, or in any way excuse Israel’s overt and grotesque evil.

And no amount of predictable emotive victim-blaming will ever change the simple facts of the matter - that Israel’s occupation of territory granted to Palestine inqq Resolution 181 is a clear violation of international law, and that Israel has caused FAR more harm, death and destruction to the Palestinian people than Hamas ever possibly could.

And they’re 100% right.

International law is very simple and straightforward - land forcibly annexed is not legitimate. Israel has no legal or valid claim to any territory beyond what it was granted in UN Resolution 181 in 1948. Every single inch of land it’s taken since then has been taken illegally, and in direct violation of the rights of the inhabitants.

And that’s even before getting into the overt evil that Israel has committed along the way - the terrorism and brutality and oppression and murder that it’s employed to incrementally steal the rightful territory of the Palestinians.

And yes - the Palestinians have every right to stand against Israel’s brutal theft of its territory and murder of its inhabitants. Their resistance is not only morally right, but entirely in keeping with international law.

How is this even a question?

They’re actively murdering Palestinians - of course they don’t give a shit about anyone else’s minorities.

Their one and only goal is conquest. Regarding Syria specifically, their first goal was to cement their illegal occupation of the Golan Heights, and that morphed into their second goal - to expand further into Syria. Since the fall of Assad (literally beginning less than 48 hours after his government fell), Israel has moved an additional 12 km into Syrian territory and built military bases and roads and laid minefields to protect their newly acquired territory.

This stuff about the Druze, just like everything else that comes out of the Israeli propaganda machine, is just there to provide their apologists with something to spin - something with which to divert attention, just a bit longer, from the simple truth that Israel is a profoundly destructive rogue state.