In other news, exponents make things big.

Any time you have an X>1 and a big n, X^n gets huge.

X=26 (if we ignore punctuation, spaces, and capitalization).
N=130,000

Not rude at all. The original question is why certain people behave in a certain way.

The first point addresses the direct reason why some voters would refuse to vote for Harris due to her stance on Israel. When people believe they are being harmed they tend to focus all their attention on the immediate harm. It’s not a logical choice but people don’t act logically in these circumstances.

As an example of this, I’d offer our response to 9/11. The entire nation came together to pass the PATRIOT act and start a war in Afghanistan. There’s no logic in passing a bill that was so long that no one in congress could have read it before voting on it. It’s hard to argue for the logic of invading Afghanistan. There wasn’t really an objective (besides “get OBL”, who we later ended up assassinating in an other country) and in retrospect it’s certainly clear that it caused far more harm than good. But we were in an emotional state. The people watching their relatives getting bombed in Gaza are in a similarly emotional state.

The second point addresses why Democrats attempts to convince them are failing so spectacularly. Getting someone to vote for your preferred candidate is an exercise in persuasion. Much has been written about the art of persuasion and “insult your audience,” isn’t generally a recommended technique. One counterexample is “pickup artists”. They theorize that by insulting or “negging” women they can motivate the woman to counter the insult by seeking the mans approval. While this does work on some small percentage of women, the vast majority are more motivated to find their mace.

2 reasons jump to mind.

1. When I listen to people who personally identify with the people of Gaza, it goes way beyond logic. They have a completely emotional reaction. Their choices are almost completely driven by the question of, “Who is doing what, right now?” Questions of, “Who will do what 6 months from now?” take a distant back seat.

2. Every time the topic comes up, Democrats dogpile on them and call them morons. People will often respond with something like, “Yeah but that’s OK because they ARE morons.” I won’t argue if that’s true or not but it’s pretty obvious that line of reasoning won’t win a lot of converts.

Were you thinking of the “fairness doctrine”?

https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/fairness-doctrine

It happens regularly.

I’d also add that I find everyday stories from real people to be vastly more engaging that the completely unbelievable stories I see on TV.

I’m not arguing that Russia is trustworthy. I’m saying that nuclear retaliation is a standard policy for any nuclear power.

We’d be relying on an other Stanislav Petrov to save us. I don’t like those odds.

Do you consider yourself these people’s friend?
If you’re completely disinterested in their milestones, that sounds more like an acquaintance.

But to your question, yes. I actually care about these things for acquaintances and random people too. There are limits to how much I care but it’s not zero.

That’s a brilliant plan. Nuclear armed countries generally have a policy of “live and let live” once they get nuked so that should work out great.

I just read that list. As near as I can tell they put a lot of words in that don’t actually promise anything helpful. Maybe I’m wrong.

Let’s make it as easy as possible to show this plan in a good light. Instead of finding one bad bullet point in that list and tearing it up, let’s see if we can find one good one.

Out of that entire list, which bullet point do you think has the best chance to actually “counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate?”

edit: grammar

I’m also offended by Israeli war crimes but I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment.

As far as I can tell, the Israeli military is very good at violence. They’re extremely well equipped, they have superb training, and their military personnel tend to be dedicated to their cause.

The main problem isn’t their ability to kill and destroy, it’s their indiscriminate use of that ability.

It’s a valid question and I’m sure the Harris campaign has spent considerable resources trying to get a good estimate of that number.

It’s pretty insane that the Democratic party officials have to say, “We’d love to stop funding a genocide but our members won’t vote for us if we do that.”

There’s quite a lot of disagreements between historians on why there’s an electoral college https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k5hv2m/what_was_the_founders_purpose_in_creating_the/

We have a lot of laws that protect people from government. The complement to such a policy is that we reduce the amount of protection government has from people.

If you assume that your government is bad or that it will inevitably become bad then this is a great policy to reduce bad government. The flip side is that if we expect government to protect us from individual bad citizens who have gained a lot of power it’s harder.

edit: grammar

That seems unlikely, since the constitution doesn’t really include safeguards against someone like Trump.

The founding fathers were afraid of a King (at least some of them were). They put all kinds of limits on the power of the executive but they assumed people would follow those rules. They never really considered the possibility of a private citizens gaining so much power that they can ignore government.

The glaring difference between the two is our level of active involvement.

Solidarity is one thing. Actually doing something about Sudan would require some sort of deliberate intervention.

In the case of Gaza we could likely make a huge difference if we just stopped arming the aggressors.

We don’t send arms to Sudan. We don’t send arms to Putin. We don’t send arms to the Sri Lankan military. We don’t send arms to Boko Haram. We don’t send arms to Myanmar.

Charity is about who benefits, not about who decides how to provide that benefit.

The idea of choosing a charity based on the donor’s will of how it will get spent describes almost all types of charity. If someone donates to any charity at all, they have made a choice on how to allocate their resources and they just take it on faith that that’s the people who need it the most.

Furthermore, any given dollar of his can only be spent once. The money he spent on himself enriches himself. It’s a considerable amount of money but it’s a tiny fraction of the money he controls. Any dollar he gives away can’t be spent to enrich himself.

Finally, Buffet has donated over $57 billion. How is he supposed to distribute that? Fly a plane around the country and dump cash out the window? Send a huge check to the IRS? Give it all to your favorite charity? The obvious answer is that he sets up an organization that will analyze existing charities for need and effectiveness and then distributes his assets accordingly.

I’ve been thinking about this exact question recently.

My Austrian grandmother and her sister were working class teenagers during the war. They couldn’t realistically have done anything to stop the Nazis. They didn’t really do much to help but since they were seamstresses they secretly snuck the Jewish family in the building some sewing supplies. It wasn’t much and they stopped when they were told that someone had reported them to the Gestapo. Their experience during the war was dodging bombs and trying to find something to eat.

None of that matters. When I was a kid growing up in the US people regularly made Nazi jokes as soon as they found out about my heritage. Nobody was willing to entertain any ideas that maybe those civilians shouldn’t have been held accountable.

History judged all of Germany and Austria harshly. It judged the civilians harshly and it judged their descendants harshly.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144717
The world is watching.

It’s a bit more than “nobody”.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/09/1154391

The problem is that the minority that is uncomfortable doing or saying anything is backed by half the worlds carrier fleets and thousands of nuclear armed ICBMS.

That would be true if he were secretly using those charities to enrich himself but there’s no evidence of that at all.

There’s an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, “nepo baby”.

Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather’s grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.

Elon’s father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn’t get you recognition from old money families. Buffet went to public school.

They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.

Maybe.

There have been a number of technologies that provided similar capabilities, at least initially.

When photography, audio recording, and video recording were first invented, people didn’t understand them well. That made it really easy to create believable fakes.

No modern viewer would be fooled by the Cottingley Fairies.
The sound effects in old radio shows and movies wouldn’t fool modern audiences either.
Video effects that stunned audiences at the time just look old fashioned now.

I expect that, over time, people will learn to recognize the low-effort scams. Eventually we’ll reach an equilibrium where most people won’t fall for them and there will still be skilled scammers who will target gullible people and get away with it.