OmnipotentEntity

I try to make it a point to listen to Benny Grunch and the Bunch's old Christmas Album at some point during December.

It caused my brother to stop talking to me. He doesn't understand how ChatGPT works, so he's trying to woo his way to GenAI by layering some sort of fake ass natural language computation system on top of the spicy auto complete.

I think you're reading more intent in my post than was actually present. I'm not denying we did genocide to 100 million natives. All I'm denying is that Jackson specifically is significantly worse than the historically reasonable alternatives to the position. Had (for instance) John Quincy Adams, one of the authors of the Monroe doctrine and a big proponent of western expansion, won the presidency, I do not doubt that a similar overall trajectory would have taken place. Maybe we wouldn't have specifically had a trail of tears moment, but there's more to the genocide of native americans than just the trail of tears.

And this is absolving responsibility of all the people who maintained slavery, which one could argue is even worse than jim crow.

How so? I believe you're arguing in good faith, but I honestly don't see how you come to this conclusion from what I wrote?

I'm not really trying to weigh and decide if 6000+ deaths and forcible removal of 100k+ people from their homes is better or worse than 100 or so years of systemic oppression followed by more, quieter oppression. Instead, I'm looking at this from the perspective of alternatives.

After the Civil War we very nearly had a moment when we could have maybe did something real for racial equality beyond anything we've seen even up to the present day. The Freeman's Bureau was fighting for wages for former slaves, and was generally a force for working class empowerment. Black congressmen were already being voted into office rapidly. If it were left to do its work, it might even have helped to innoculate the Irish- and Italian-Americans against future union busting on Black/White racial lines a few decades down the line.

Instead, after only about a year, Andrew Johnson started fighting and dismantling the Bureau, placing the former slaveowners back into a de facto master/slave relationship with their former slaves, giving the old Southern Democrats back their political power, and generally restoring the status quo as much as possible. The Bureau itself lasted only 5 or 6 years, don't remember. The KKK rose up because reconstruction wasn't there anymore to prevent it, because the Democrats wanted so bad to just put all of the states back in the union and go back to bad old days, and so on.

That was never a realistic moment that I know of in American history where people against war with the native tribes of this land had outsized power and influence. Jackson completely ignoring the Supreme Court's ruling was awful, but while the ruling was grounded in good moral and legal principles, it was, like it or not, extremely unpopular. There wasn't an entire party with a supermajority in Congress that could have kept up the pressure on this issue.

Andrew Jackson was Trail of Tears, but I actually think Andrew Johnson was arguably worse. He was Lincoln's Democrat vice president (he was brought on to help "balance the ticket" instead of sticking with his strongly abolitionist first term VP Hannibal Hamlin), who started dismantling reconstruction and giving the power back to the former slaveowners.

You can pretty much lay Jim Crow at his feet.

A PIN isn't exactly high security...

Sure, I'm a Linux user.

Requires Microsoft Hello, which seems to be a biometric login, which as I understand it means that it is not covered under 5th amendment protections against self-incrimination. You can't simply refuse to give up your fingerprint or facial recognition, and now cops just plainly have access to whatever your computer usage history is.

Which is why the slang for diamonds is "ice." They feel quite cold when you touch them because they have such high thermal conductivity.

Oh God, I'm so sorry, I just realized this post is 6 days old wow.

She lost for a lot of reasons. OP has one of them. You have another. Both are valid and work to partially explain her loss.

But honestly, significantly lower turnout by Dems this cycle seems to be the underlying cause of her loss. Whether that stems from Israel (or her gender, or her unwillingness to distance herself from Biden, or her inability to don the mantle of a populist in an age where populism is ousting governments all over the world, or her campaign's difficulty in countering Republican messaging effectively, or a million other reasons you could invent) is debatable, and probably will be picked apart and analyzed by people far more qualified than I and probably also you. There are studies to be made, data to gather, and so on.

Blaming everything on a single cause based on vibes is fine, rhetorically. And I wish Dems did more of that, because it is effective messaging, and it's certainly true that this country still has a misogyny problem. But if you're interested in understanding and picking apart the actual causes of Harris's loss, then being open minded does help. And the rhetoric can be saved for a forum where it is more likely to piss off a Trump voter.