PLEASE understand the danger of thinking "Biden is supporting Israel = Don't vote for Biden"
Politics
Edit: I see that many of you seem to have missed an important message that I was trying to convey with this post. Please see
this comment.
Remember
this thread? Yeah, well...I'm still seeing people telling other people that they shouldn't vote for Biden because of his support of the Israeli government.
- Israel is committing a genocide.
- It seems that Biden's administration is still supporting them anyway.
- These are both terrible things worthy of condemnation.
However...Biden is currently regarded as the candidate most likely to successfully defeat trump at the polls in November. You know, trump? The piece of garbage poised to allow the advancement of Project 2025, who promised to become a dictator, and who would probably
love to see us thrown into camps? Yeah,
that trump. We can't afford to have people doing things that help trump in
any way, and that includes choosing not to vote for Biden in the New York state primary
where Biden is not even running unopposed. Edit: Some math I've done suggests the AP may have called the primaries in March. I am not
certain that they did, because I never found any articles about that, and I have been too busy with problems that affect me more directly to keep track of AP news. Unfortunately, it seems that some people think that not voting for Biden in the general election is
also okay.
Look, you ladies are cute. I'm subscribed to a number of subreddits where all of you post pictures of yourselves trying on your lovely outfits...yeah, I admit it. It's pretty awesome. All of
you are awesome...but I've seen some of you posting in a particular subreddit that was established by a person who, just today (yesterday? It's almost 3 AM here, now), told people that they shouldn't be voting for Biden in the New York primary
as it was happening. They told
me that it wouldn't help trump get elected because it was just a primary election...
...but a quick Google search shows that Biden is running against someone for the NY primary. Now, what would happen to Biden's chance of beating trump in November if Biden lost the democratic primary election in multiple states because of a few votes for Biden's opposition that accompanied a lot of ballots in which no vote for a president was cast? It's an extreme case, and not likely - I have no idea if anyone was making a similar recommendation about other state primaries - but it's really not hard to imagine how such recommendations could become problematic. It's very
easy to imagine how such recommendations could be the result of an alt-right group looking for low effort ways to interfere with elections.
Simply not voting is still dangerous, even if you don't actually vote for Biden's opposition, for the same reason that we're trying to have Biden beat trump instead of having someone else go against trump:
you can't predict or control the behavior of everyone else, so you need to account for what others are expecting you to do. Every time you choose to not vote for Biden, you're giving up your most reliable tool for voting against trump, because most people are already convinced that the final battle is going to be between Biden and trump.
If it's permitted, I'll name the subreddit/link to the post that I'm talking about, but it might be obvious to some of you already. There are other moderators within that subreddit that
agree with the post that I saw, which, again, was made by
the creator of the subreddit. People were angry about their post - not because it suggested that people shouldn't vote for Biden, but because the post accused Americans of doing nothing to protest the genocide of the people of Palestine - and the comments they made to express their anger obtained many upvotes very quickly...
...but some of us used our comments to point out the issues associated with not voting for Biden. The response to mine was an unconvincing argument that primary elections don't matter, and the subreddit creator actually started receiving downvotes for expressing that sentiment. They ultimately deleted that comment, and many other comments as well, including a comment that I had referenced in my own comment that had been posted by someone sharing my concern. The whole thing made me
very uncomfortable, and knowing that the other moderators agree with the sub creator definitely makes the discomfort worse. I legitimately couldn't tell if I was watching someone scrambling to delete their own comments, and the comments criticizing those comments, so that they could preserve their public reputation...or if I was watching a sleeper cell come to life to enforce hate in a way that would allow them to effortlessly hide their motives, because their positions as moderators allow them to simply censor anyone who questions their behavior. Edit: Given that Biden may have been guaranteed to win the primaries as long ago as March, the latter scenario is a lot less likely...but banning people for not being familiar with the election schedule is still disreputable.
can only convey their words through making throughly American problems in America about us and our peoples.
We have turned into the Middle East
We have oppressed women's rights, and will allow people to carry guns in public all the while letting the ideology of a single organized religion openly dictate federal laws.
America has fallen.
*edit for teh record , this isn't an Anti middle east post.. it's an anti forcing a religion down people's throats who don't believe in it post...
International flight with a stopover in Dubai
How safe is it going to be for me to fly via Dubai? I'm post op, I have a passing voice, and all of my paperwork says female, however visually, my passing is inconsistent. I pass at a glance, but if I'm being actively studied in detail by a customs officer, I may or may not pass. I will only be doing a layover in Dubai, and have no intention of leaving the airport, however I'm not even sure how that works, or if I'll find myself having to go through customs even for a layover?
Avoiding Dubai adds significant time to my travel, so it's not something I want to do unless I have to.