If you still think Democrats actually care about a potential mass deportation, ask yourself why Biden hasn't simply pardoned all undocumented immigrants.
Immigration offenses are federal crimes, the president can pardon federal crimes, and you don't actually have to be charged with anything or convicted to receive a pardon (see Nixon).
We’d had Star Trek for two years by that point. It really was not that groundbreaking.
Star Wars came out 9 years after 2001 (edit: and the original series Star Trek doesn’t have near the realism of 2001). The visuals absolutely were groundbreaking -- they still hold up, and look better than all but a handful of space movies that came out before about the 90s.
Your point with the pacing is fair, but I think about half that is an artifact of the time or a byproduct of watching it on a couch with a smartphone instead of in a theater.
"Ignore the problem, hope you get rich enough to keep ignoring the symptoms"
Biden wasn’t close to perfect. He wasn’t hard enough on Netanyahu, opting to express frustrations with him privately rather than through policy, because being pro-Israel is a popular view in the US.
Biden circumvented Congress and violated standing law to fund a genocide. The bare minimum was not aiding Israel in any way, and he did not even entertain that.
Setting aside that Israel's ongoing genocide isn't actually popular, say it was for the sake of argument. That still doesn't mean you support it. You may have to actually do your job as a politician and shape public opinion on an important matter, or even do the right thing despite it potentially harming your career. Again, bare minimum stuff.
If you want to blame someone for making Trump a serious candidate, blame Democrats:
So to take [Jeb] Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read.
“The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.
“Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
Ted Cruz
Donald Trump
Ben Carson
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428
I think it's important to differentiate pacifism as a strategy -- the total renunciation of anything that could be considered violence, often including even mere property damage -- with non-violence as one tactic among many.
Many movements have had success using non-violence as a tactic in certain situations, so long as those movements don't take the possibility of ever using violence completely off the table (pacifism).
It's also worth noting that Mandela founded the ANC's guerilla branch. Western media today portrays him as a purely non-violent, MLK-like figure, but in reality he was central to the ANC's decision to begin an armed struggle against apartheid.
It's almost as if:
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
The people violently resisting a genocide are also good guys.
If someone is trying to kill you and everyone who looks like you, shooting back is good.
repairing harm through dialogue between victims, offenders, and community members
What if the person who committed the crime doesn't want to engage in this process? What if the victim of the crime doesn't want to? What if a person accused of a crime maintains their innocence? There are plenty of cases where restorative justice can work, but many others where it won't.
addressing root causes like poverty, mental health issues, and substance abuse
the goal is to create a society where crime is less likely to occur
I think this is a much better framework to work with than prison abolition. Picking up the pieces after a crime has been committed is expensive and usually leaves you choosing from a range of bad options.
Sometimes the law is wrong, and following it is wrong
Dying for nothing in a lost war is one of those times
The only way this can turn around for Ukraine is a the war expanding into a (more) direct conflict between Russia and NATO, which would create a high risk of a nuclear exchange, which is unacceptable.
Ukraine lost. The only question now is how many more of their people they'll send to pointlessly die before they start serious negotiations (i.e., not wild demands like getting Crimea). This is the months leading up to the end of WWI.
I agree -- the U.S. should stay out of the conflict by immediately ceasing all shipments of bombs and money to Israel.