I think the first part of your post kinda starts to answer what you quoted from me below it.

Love for your country is an emotion, so it’s not rational or logic.

It is however something one gets from society because nobody is born with love for one’s country nor naturally grow it by themselves without outside contact, whilst most people naturally grow love for their parents, brothers and sisters (or are born with it?) as well as love (in the broader sense) for some of the people you know well (i.e. good friends and in a different sense romantic partners).

Mind you, love (again in the broader sense) for a group one belongs to (for example one’s sports team) is natural for most people, often to the point of being tribalism.

Anyways, the point being that countries are artificial, societal constructs, so that’s the first part of “love for your country” being artificial and whilst the general cognitive mechanisms to learn to “love” a group is natural, for it to be for the very specific group which is a country, requires that you’re somehow influenced from the outside towards it, if only by constant exposure to talk about “our country”, so that too can be artificially pushed (maybe it might happen naturally from mere exposure and without a “push”, though from what I’ve observed having lived in a couple of countries, the levels of Nationalism and Patriotism in a country seem to be positively correlated to how much the media and politicians talk about “the country” which for me indicates that for most people such love it’s pushed on them).

But why would the boundaries of your “home” be as big as a country?

Sure, being proud of yourself makes sense, and of your family and close friends and of the things were you or they have a strong influence over like their homes and what they do which in some cases means their jobs.

However being proud of something were you and those you hold dearest are but a tiny, tiny fraction with pretty much zero influence is not at all the same thing, especially if most of the great things about it are the product of the works of people long dead.

My point being that pride in one’s country is an artificial thing which you’ve been pushed into having from the outside and as such is a prime vector to manipulate you (and all it takes is to listen to politicians harp about the greatness of one’s country to see that it is indeed being used for that by some), not something natural like pride for you and those close to you and their deeds.

I wouldn’t be surprised if my words above feel wrong, but under a cold logical analysis, do they come out as wrong?

In all fairness it’s only an assumption of those who confused Nationalism with Patriotism.

Patriotism (what can I do for my country) fits naturally with Leftwing principles (such as “The greatest good for the greatest number”) whilst Nationalism (what can I get from being born were I was born) fits naturally with Rightwing principles (such as “What’s in it for me?”)

I don’t think there is any valid excuse to force somebody to “come out of the closet” against their will, even hypocrisy. It’s their choice to come out, not anybody else’s.

I would expect that gay men, given the massive prosecution that they’ve been subject to in the past (and still are in many countries nowadays), would share that feeling, but maybe it’s because I’m from a generation that grew up at a time when homophobia was absolutely normal and later lived in places which weren’t like that at all were I’ve met gay men who had left their own countries in order to be able to be with the people they loved, and were I figured out just how unfair and casually nasty I had been in the years before.

Doing this kind of thing thinking you’re holding a high moral ground because the other person is in some way immoral is exactly the kind of thinking extreme religious types have when they go after, amongst others, homosexuals.

As much as I dislike conservatives, I dislike even more doing this shit to somebody and the kind of person who would do so.

The point is that willingness to vote, dislike of Trump, the strenght of ones principle, even political awareness and other similar things are scales, not just absolutes.

Some people will always vote, some never, others can be convinced or convince themselves with different levels of inducement (be it fear or enthusiasm).

Ditto for dislike of Trump - people are all over from love him to hate him and everything in between.

As for principles, well, some people are inflexible no mater what, most are somewhere in the middle being capable of breaking certain principles in certain conditions and other have a Groucho Marx take on them (“These are my principles. If you don’t like them, well, I have others.”)

And ditto for political awareness: just because all you see and hear is the very politically aware types talking about politics because they’re loudly political, doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot people who think, for example, that “it’s all a show and my vote makes no difference so why should I care?”

Just because you, being at a specific point of those various scales, are very politically aware and could easily be cowed by fear of Trump whom (I assume) you detest to vote Democrat even if they were actively going against your principles (assuming one of them is “people shouldn’t be killed due to their race”), doesn’t mean that many others at different points of those scales ended up not voting for Harris when they could otherwise have voted Democrat if it wasn’t for her making choices that went against their strongly held principles or her campaign strategy of fear rather than hope didn’t work on them because they have mixed feelings about Trump so don’t fear him or think their “my vote makes no difference - they’re all bullshitters who don’t do what they say” so don’t see the point in voting for the other guys because Trump is Bad.

Harris’ actions and campaign strategy did capture the votes of people like you even if you had to hold your nose (which they couldn’t care less about) to vote Harris, but those choices of them stopped from voting Harris plenty of people who sit elsewhere in these scales and would otherwise vote Democrat.

Clealy had she chosen differently she would’ve captured the votes of people not quite at your end of those various scales but by all indications the positions she assumed and campaign strategy moved the peak appeal points in those various scales in such away that it dropped a lot more votes (mainly on the Left, Highly Principled and Distrusting of Politics sides) than the ones it gained from appealing to the other side (mainly Rightwing, Party fanatics and unprincipled or even supporting of the Israeli Genocide).

The Democrat loss is not the fault of voters for being who they are, it’s the fault of the Democrats for chosing a strategy of using the fear of Trump to retain votes whilst breaking some pretty strong principles of many people with their support for mass murderers of children, and not fixing certain things during the years they were in power and then last minute announcing measures for it (which is really not going to convince the people more distrusting of politicians to go out and vote).

After the Emissions Scandal and an estimated 10 thousand excess deaths a year in Europe because of diesel emissions: Fuck the European Auto Industry.

Their dragging of feet on moving to EV technology is also disgraceful.

And don’t get me started on the over-reliance on cars in most of Europe.

All in all, they’re a negative for Europe, not a positive, and if they can’t compete with the bloody Chinese, well, let the Free Market they so love for everything else do a little Constructive Destruction on them,

Portugal has exactly the same system (I’ve lived in both countries) which has actually even more features (such as letting you pay yours bills at any ATM) than the Dutch one.

I think that at least in Europe the countries were ATMs rely on VISA or Mastercard for inter-bank withdrawals like in the UK and US are the exception rather than the rule.

I live in a 10 million people European country which is the leading cork producer in the World

Also the first European country to explicitly decriminalise drug consumption.

Those two things are unrelated.

If the information never leaves the device then it doesn’t need a policy - privacy is not about what an app does in the device which never leaves the device hence never gets shared, it’s about what it shares with a 3rd party.

A clock doesn’t need to send system time settings information to a server since that serves no purpose for it - managing that is all done at the OS level and the app just uses what’s there - and that’s even more so for location data since things like determining the timezone are done by the user at the OS level, which will handle stuff like prompting the user to update the timezone if, for example, it detects the device is now in a different timezone (for example, after a long trip).

That’s because it’s not a clock, it’s a private information stealing app disguised as a clock.

There is a real possibility that the person who would be best for Palestine would be Trump simply because he doesn’t follow through on what he says and is too incompetent when he does.

It’s a very sad state of affairs that the US Presidential Candidate that might be the least Nazi-supporting one is Trump, not because of his ideology not being Fascist but because he’s incompetent, inconsistent and has a tendency for non-interventionism.

You have it backwards: going after the natural voters of the other side in a two-party system is the riskiest thing you can do because the other party has a massive advantage with those voters which is an historical track record of telling them what they want to hear and them voting for it - rightwingers trust them on Rightwing subjects and are used to voting for them.

Even if (and it’s a massive massive if) a party succeeds at it once due to the party on the other side having deviated too much from its traditional ideology, all it takes for the party on the other side is to “get back to its roots” to recover most of those lost votes and subsequently win, whilst meanwhile the leftmost party that moved to the right has created for itself an obstacle in their own “going back to its roots” in the form of a section of the electorate which feels they were betrayed.

Sure, they’ll eventually get it back if they themselves quickly “go back to their roots”, but it will take several electoral cycles.

Further, if that gap remains too long on the Left even in a two party system it would create room for a third to grow, starting by local elections, then places like Congress, then Senate and eventually even the Presidency.

One of of the key ways in which First Past The Post maintains a Power-Duopoly is because growing a party enough to challenge the rest in multiple electoral circles takes time and the duopoly parties will try to stop it (generally by changing back their policies to appeal to the core voters of that new Party).

The US itself once had the Whig Party as one of the power duopoly parties and that exists no more.

The Democrats abandoning the Left is not a stable configuration for them and carries both the risk that the Rightwing electorate sees them as fake and the Leftwing electorate feels betrayed, and now they’re stuck in the middle with a reduced vote.

Whilst the first paragraph does make some sense, it presumes that in such a situation the Republicans would not conclude it’s the style of the candidate rather than his ideas that caused the rout. That might be a little optimist considering that the traditional Republicans’ were just as far right economically before and almost as right in Moral issues, but they had a different style of candidate (remember Reagan?).

It might also be a little optimist to expect an absolute walloping of anybody, Republican or Democrat.

That said, it’s a valid scenario, though it relies on very low probability events.

The second paragraph is inconsistent with every single thing the Democrats have done in their pre-electoral propaganda, from the whole “vote us or get Trump” (something which wouldn’t scare the Right) to the raft of pre-election promises on Left-wing subjects like student debt forgiveness or tightening regulations on giants such as Telecoms a little bit. If they really thought they could win with only votes stolen from the Right, they would be making promises which appeal to the Right, not the Left.

Besides, the whole idea that Rightwing voters would go for the less-Rightwing party rather than the more-Rightwing party is hilarious: why go for the copy if you can get the real deal?

From what I’ve seen in other countries were Center-Left Parties totally dropped their appeal to the Left and overtly went to appeal to the Right, they got pummeled because the Maths don’t add up and, as I said above, Rightwing votes will choose the “genuine article” over the “wannabes”.

It’s not by chance that in Europe even whilst becoming full-on Neoliberal parties, Center-Left parties maintained a leftwing discourse and would throw a bone to the Left once in a while (say, minimum wage raises) when in government.

Three points:

• Biden and Harris are right now with their actions physically supporting the Genocide. Trump talks about supporting the Genocide even more. Well, guess what: Trump lies shamelessly (as the Democrat propaganda here doesn’t stop reminding us of in everything but, “strangely”, not this subject) and isn’t even competent when it comes to actual execution. So on one side we have an absolute certainty that the candidate supports the Genocide and on the other one we have a probability that its so based on the statements of a known liar. I would say the claims that Trump is worse on this are doing a lot of relying on Trump’s word (on this subject alone) in order to elevate his evilness of this above that of people who are actually, right now, shamelessly and unwaveringly supporting the Genocide with actual actions.
• If the Leadership of Democrat Party manages to whilst refusing to walk back on their active support of a Genocide, win the election with a “otherwise it’s Trump” strategy, they will move even further to the Right because that confirms to them that they can do whatever they want and still keep in power. Now, keep in mind that the Democract Party leadership already supports Fascism (ethno-Fascism, even, which is the same kind as the Nazis practiced), so far only abroad (whilst Trump does support Fascism at home) so there isn’t much more to the Right of that before Fascism at home. You see, for a Leftie voting Democrat now will probably be the least bad option in the short term, but it’s very likely to be the worst option in the long term because it consolidates and even accelerates the move of the Democrat Party to the Right.
• Some people simply put their moral principles above “yeah but” excuses and won’t vote for people supporting the mass murder of children.

In summary:

• Trump’s Genocide support is a probability based on his word, willingness and ability to fulfill it (i.e. his competence at doing it), whilst Harris’ is an actual proven fact with actions happening right now.
• A vote for the Democrats whilst their policies are so far to the Right that they’re supporting modern Nazis with the very weapons they use to mass murder civilians of the “wrong” ethnicity, if it leads to a Harris victory will consolidate this de facto Far-Right status of the party and maintain momentum in going Rightwards. Voting like that is, IMHO, a Strategically stupid choice even if the case can be made (and that’s the entirety of what the Democrat propaganda here does) that Tactically it’s the least bad choice.
• Some people can’t just swallow their moral principles, especially for making a choice which isn’t even a “choose a good thing” but actually a “choose a lesser evil”, and “Thou shall not mass murder thousands of babies” is pretty strong as moral principles go.

How else would the twisted sense of humour character trait be passed to the next generation?

Isn’t that just tribalism or clubism in general?

For example, if one looks at footbal (soccer for Americans) fans, their “judgement” on the validity of faults and sanctions (or lack thereof) is entirelly dependent of whose team they support and almost invariably they side with whatever the important people of “their” team (like the coach, important players and even the club’s manager) say with zero logical analysis and if you actually bring logic into it and it goes against “their” team, the biggest fans just get angry and dismiss it all.

People with a strong emotinal bond to a “team” judge messages in that domain based on the messager and which team it favours, rather than on the contents of and supporting evidence for the message itself.

Since Psychopathy and Sociopathy are ranges rather than absolutes, it’s estimated that about 4% of humans are Psychopaths or Sociopaths and we’re talking about the what’s basically the handful of people in a universe of over 300 million who seeks and achieves positions at the top of the Power Duopoly in the US in a domain well know for it’s cut-throating and backstabbing, I would say that the odds heavily favour the explanation of them being very high on the Sociopath (or Psychopath) - so called “well adjusted Sociopaths” - spectrum than them being normal people who are “relaxed about personally enabling the murder of tens of thousands of children”.

The image of a Sociopaths or Psychopath who actively seeks to inflict horrible pain on others for their own pleasure is incredibly atypical and Hollywoodesque - being high on those scales just means having no empathy for others, including their suffering or joy, and the result is that a Sociopath or Psychopath simply does that which they think is better for themselves and they can get away with (they care about the consequences for themselves, not for others), with absolutely no consideration for how that makes others feel, hence harm or even death of others is fine since that has the same emotional resonance for them as breaking an inanimate object.

Fossil Fuels are decreasing as a percentage of the overall energy supply that powers so much of the Economy and Industrial and Agricultural production in Western Economies are a small fraction of the total (less than 20% together).

Nowadays it’s not about the West making things with pillaged resources from the Global South, it’s all Financialization and the Ultra-Wealthy extracting the last leftover wealth from everybody, everything and everywhere like the endgame in a Monopoly Game.

Oil by itself is not enough justification, IMHO.

Besides, Israel is being the very opposite of a force for stability in the region, which isn’t going to help the Petro-Dollar.

(If you go check the Gold markets, it’s never been this high, something which possibly signals increasing distrust in the US Dollar and other main currencies)

You can chose to dip you hands in the blood of thousands of dead children by activelly rewarding a candidate who is enabling their murder, or you can chose not to.

Given the lack of Democracy in the American system, that means that you either participate hence end up with blood on your hands no matter which of the two electable candidates you vote for or do not participate.The choices of others who do participate are irrelevant for that decision.

Justifying your choice of supporting a enabler of child murder candidate because others might chose the candidate you dislike the most and hence makes you fear for yourself, is not the high moral standpoint you seem to think it is.

Absolutely, it’s a though choice. However this preaching you and those like you are doing about “Not voting is a vote for Trump” is not done from the top of a Moral High Horse, it’s from the top of the pile of the bloody bones of tens of thousands of murdered children which is still growing, and driven by at best selfish self-preservation not any kind of selfless moral principle.

So spare us the bullshit.

The slaughter of innocent children makes no difference to sociopaths.

If there is one thing this Genocide on its way to Holocaust has shown us. is that the Democrat Party leadership are without a doubt sociopaths of the worst kind: a normal person with the power they have would not be actively helping it by sending the Neue Nazis the very weapons which they know are being used to massacre children.

There really is no other possible conclusion: no normal person would go “yeah but our campaign contributions from the AIPAC are more important than tens of thousands of dead children” or “yeah but the profits of the MIC shareholders are more important than tens of thousands of dead children”.