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.

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 involvement.

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.

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.

It’s not just the sexual aspect that makes people uncomfortable.

Many people view it as childish. Children are really into their stuffed animals and love playing dress up. There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying activities normally associated with children but other adults tend to look down on it.

Some furries like to talk about their fursona as a spiritual extension of themselves. Many people associate that kind of language with crazy old hippies.

Allies are only ever allies of convenience.

The US was allied with both the USSR and China for the sake of convenience. Right after that war the US allied with its erstwhile enemies, Japan, Germany and Italy for the sake of convenience. The Marshal Islands maintain diplomatic relations with both China and the US for their own convenience.

BRIC (South Africa joined later) was initially coined as a description of quickly emerging economies by a Goldman Sachs economist. Since then it’s become an actual trading block that coordinates on economic policy. It’s very obviously dominated by China but the other members see advantage in joining a club that’s not obviously dominated by the US.

The combined GDP of BRICS nations now exceeds the combined GDP of the G20. If it’s a joke, it’s a pretty successful one.

You’re right. They’re not LLMs and they’re not particularly new.

The main new part is that new techniques in AI and better hardware means that we can get better answers than we used to be able to get. Many people also realize that there’s a lot of potential to develop systems that are much better at answering those questions.

So when people ask, “Why are companies investing in AI when customers hate AI.” Part of the answer is that they’re investing in something different than what most people think of when they hear “AI”.

A lot of people have come to realize that LLMs and generative AI aren’t what they thought it was. They’re not electric brains that are reasonable replacements for humans. They get really annoyed at the idea of a company trying to do that.

Some companies are just dumb and want to do it anyway because they misread their customers.

Some companies know their customer hate it but their research shows that they’ll still make more money doing it.

Many people that are actually working with AI realize that AI is great for a much larger set of problems. Many of those problems are worth a ton of money; (eg. monitoring biometric data to predict health risks earlier, natural disaster prediction and fraud detection).

Finding plot holes in Harry Potter is like shooting fish in a barrel. There’s no challenge to it.

Rowling took “a wizard did it” as far as it can go.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=a+wizard+did+it#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:2884189e,vid:sVgVB3qsySQ,st:0

I almost forgot “pants”.

Yeah. It confused me at first too.

It’s not too bad when they use some word that we never use at all. I had no trouble figuring out what a “bellend” is.

It’s more of an issue when they use a word differently.
Me: “Yo blondie, that’s not how you’re supposed to wear condoms.”
Nigel Covington III: “You git, I most certainly do wear rubbers on my feet.”

That’s just the name.

In the UK, “public school” just means that admissions are generally open to the public. They’re still very expensive, are often boarding schools, and tend to have a lot of castles on their campuses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)

That’s one of many many plot holes in Harry Potter.

There’s really no depth to the world building beyond, “What if British public schools taught magic?”

It doesn’t make sense in any context beyond that because the author never considered it from any context beyond that. Whenever you run into some crazy crap in HP and wonder, “Why TF would anyone do it that way?” The answer is almost always, "Because that’s how they do it in British public schools.