I remember arguing for days, in 2024, that the whole “Democrats are bad because Palestine” thing was clearly a psyop by Russian bots trying to mess with the election. I really need to improve my persuasion skills. Like by a lot.
Even knowing that Trump was going to actively help Bibi? That’s the thing I didn’t understand: sure, the Democrats were not doing much to stop the slaughter, but from the previous Trump administration we knew Trump was going to actively help.
Imagine being so disingenuous that you actually believe (or at least want others to think you do) that we just didn’t know whether Trump would be worse than Harris on Palestine, Iran, and every other fucking thing possible for that matter. I never used to hold much creedence with the whole paid russian or chinese actors angle, even back in 2016. It is becoming more and more difficult to rationally explain how anybody actually living in the US could, with a straight face, make equivalency arguments between Trump and Clinton, Biden, or Harris. It does, however, seem like a perfectly rational act for foreign actors who just want to accelerate their replacement of the US as hegemon to take.
One side probably won’t stop it, but they’re on our side so there’s a sliver of a cintilla of a chance we could pressure them into it.
The other side absolutely would not, vocally stated he would help accelerate it, and would laugh in our faces and do even more to accelerate it for no other reason than it made us mad.
The choice should have been obvious, even if I and everyone else would have preferred better options.
I know people who felt that both sides at least tacitly supporting the genocide was so depressing that for their mental health they basically checked out of politics.
No, that response isn’t helpful, but it’s a very real thing that happens to real people. They needed a candidate that cared that people’s lives were ending across the sea, and neither side offered that.
That hurt Kamala’s chances in a very real way, and might even be the deciding factor for Trump’s second term.
While you and I can look at this and go “Wow, that’s not logical, she’s way better than Trump”, the Democratic campaign should have had political scientists and psychologists that knew about this well-documented phenomenon. I imagine they did, and ignored it, because siding against Israel would’ve cost money.
So while it’s true that the choice was still objectively obvious, it’s also completely true that the Democratic campaign absolutely mishandled it, because this isn’t some new phenomenon, and group human psychology isn’t unpredictable. It’s also not the fault of those who didn’t vote because of that.
While you and I can look at this and go “Wow, that’s not logical, she’s way better than Trump”, the Democratic campaign should have had political scientists and psychologists that knew about this well-documented phenomenon. I imagine they did, and ignored it, because siding against Israel would’ve cost money.
At the very least maybe the Dem party should have been smart enough lie publically that they would censor Israel and reevaluate US support of Israel (even if they wouldn’t actually follow through). It’s almost like losing is preferable to risking any AIPAC $.
But we’ve got a bunch of supposed leftists in this very thread talking about how they wouldn’t vote for these types of democrats. These are people that obsensibly are self aware enough not to let their supposedly so well informed morality be determined by feeling bummed out about their options.
I don’t expect miracles from the average, barely informed voter. I do fucking expect supposed informed leftists to not actively campaign against voting. I expect them to fucking understand this “obvious” situation. THAT is my main sticking point.
Yes, and white people get depressed about racism, so they just ignore what bums them out. Insane that a defense of online leftists amounts to “they just such smol bean, they too bummed for voting sad face”.
While you and I can look at this and go “Wow, that’s not logical, she’s way better than Trump”, the Democratic campaign should have had political scientists and psychologists that knew about this well-documented phenomenon. I imagine they did, and ignored it, because siding against Israel would’ve cost money.
D and R parties both need independent voters to win any election. For example, even if every D voted for a D, they would lose without independents voting for them in significant numbers. This has been a political fact for many years.
So… why did the Harris campaign target REPUBLICAN voters (instead of Ds and independents)? They wasted a lot of vital time on that (“He doesn’t need to know who you voted for” etc), and they knew that they would lose if they did so.
She knew it too, Harris isn’t stupid. She took a knee.
I’m not fully convinced the conspiracy is that deep, but also if hard evidence came out saying so, I wouldn’t be surprised.
You don’t have to believe my word, but answer this question. You are a Democratic veteran. You KNOW for a FACT that you need Democratic and Independent voters to win. Simple mathematics demands that you do so to win.
Why, oh why, would you pursue the Republican vote? They’ve never done this before in a Presidential election. It can’t work. It’s never worked before, anyway.
This was discussed openly during the campaign, tons of Republican outreach and advertising with the Harris run… why?
I cannot think of any other reason, I would actually feel a lot better if there was a logical reason, somebody help my troubled mind
yep, and the Dem leadership still support israel no matter what they do. They learned nothing and will try to set up the same voter hostage situation in every vote from now on.
Just because humans are vulnerable to certain psychological effects, doesn’t mean it’s not the fault of those who were effected by them. Humans are also vulnerable to stress eating. That doesn’t remove the blame from fat asses with no self-control.
And this person absolutely should have better self-control, whoever the fuck, sorry, TF she is.
Yes “my way”. As an American jew I’m totally not horrified by what my supposed homeland is doing, and I certainly don’t challenge anyone to call me a Jewish antisemite for saying “Fuck Israel”. And I also don’t still have to live with that complicit radioactive orange dementia patient as my fucking President because a bunch of pansy cocksuckers couldn’t get off their knees and go fucking vote against him.
We don’t live in a world of “should”, in the real world of course it is demoralizing and affects the vote turnout.
We all know the US government will back Israel no matter what… and the voters can only punish the incumbent party for doing so.
65% of Democrats don’t want to finance Israel. Two thirds of their own party, that’s massive!
Voter turnout will continue to fall; D and R parties will continue to lose voters (now down to 30% registered voters each) and the Independents will continue to grow (now up to 40% of voters).
Why? Because our major parties ignore what their constituents actually want, and we can only punish one party every term.
The same people in this thread blaming voters for how Kamala Harris ran their campaign were the same ones insisting we had to run Biden as the incumbent, and calling you a bit or a school if you said they needed to be replaced.
We wouldn’t have this outcome if the people who’ve made it their entire identity to blame voters had placed their frustrations with the party and demanded better, sooner, when it could have made a material difference.
The problem then being the electorate. The same group so many here want to absolve. You may not care about politics and want to ‘check out’ but it still cares about you and will still effect you even if you try to ignore it. In that vein elections will still happen and people you agree/disagree with will still be given power over you and your life. No matter how low the turn out a decision will be made with or without your input. Better to do what you can to give that input and make it the most useful it can be, before you get no input at all
The very fact that the Trolley Problem exists as a thought experiment and there is still active discourse over the correct solution should tell you why people didn’t all feel that they had a responsibility to vote for harm reduction. You can’t expect an election that resembles a famously divisive philosophical thought experiment to turn out with everyone arriving at the same conclusion, and it’s pointless to dwell on the fact that everyone didn’t fall in line with what you think is obvious rather than adjusting to the reality and acting accordingly. That means getting candidates elected in primaries that aren’t going to put us in the same trolley problem come time for the general.
That means getting candidates elected in primaries that aren’t going to put us in the same trolley problem
You can also put pressure on candidates mid-campaign to change posture.
I can tell you this, the Venn Diagram of the people itt blaming voters for the Democrats supporting a genocide in 2024, and the people who didn’t want Biden to step down is basically a perfect circle. Its also the same circle which shielded Harris from any critiques on her support for genocide.
If every election is a decision between the lesser of two evils and both evils become more evil over time then harm isn’t actually reduced in the long run. This is why harm reduction is a failing long term electoral strategy.
It absolutely is the best option, IF these are the only options.
You don’t get to constantly pretend that there’s some obvious other solution without ever naming AND campaigning it.
Basically, this entire thread is filled to the brim with online leftists hating on every possible option, propose fiire bombing walmarts, and then NEVER ACTUALLY FIREBOMB A WALMART.
It requires immense amounts of privilege to campaign for waiting for a better option to magically manifest.
Perhaps. But that’s not the world we live in. Demanding an electorate to suddenly change in a way it never has and start behaving like Homo economicus is only going to lead to further loses.
Honestly, people behaving like Homo economicus is how you get MAGA.
Think about it. Isn’t Trump’s pitch to voters ultimately an argument in rational self-interest? It’s all “I’ll make an in group and an out group. You’ll be in the in group. I’ll pull up the in group while pushing down the out group.”
Racism and sexism are rational. Or at least they are rational from those that benefit from them. Think about a white male living in the Jim Crows South. Your life was made soooo much easier by racism and sexism. There were whole career fields where they were the only quarter of the population that were eligible for them. They were automatically in the top quarter of society, simply by their race and sex.
Anti-immigrant zealotry is rational. If you’re a native-born US citizen working in the construction industry? Every legal or illegal immigrant being deported would cause your standard of living to soar. Economists would tell you that on net it will harm the economy. But if suddenly the pool of construction workers is cut in half, any US citizen who knows how to swing a hammer is now rolling in dough. That’s the rational terror of fascism - every time another group in the “first they came for” poem is liquidated, someone ends up with their property, their jobs, their place in the social order, etc.
You NEED to have a respect for persons built into your ethical framework, or else you can end up justifying evils of all sorts, all in the name of the greater good. Hell, Dr. Mengele slept well every night, content in the knowledge that he was doing the greatest good for the greatest number.
Absolute nonsense, and the Palestinian Americans who voted ‘undetermined’ en masse during the Democratic primaries to send a message to Biden/Harris knew it too. The party made their choice between the people and an unpopular genocide. They chose genocide.
Hey guess what. The genocide got even worse under harris’ opposition. How did that work out for all the genocide joe non-voters. How have palestinians benefitted under those protest votes/non-votes. Not to mention all the dead iranians that wouldnt be had harris won
I was trying tp get people to vote for the person that wasnt going to start more wars in the middle east. Or kill random people in the carribean. Or put all trans people on a watch list. Or rail against any form of electrification. No the only ones who accomplished their hoals were those trying to get americans to think that the above candidate was the same as harris. You know realy morons.
Really wed be at war with iran? Wed be blowing up random boats and killing people in the caribean? We would have snatched up other country leaders? We would have completely destroyed world trade by tarrifing every other country on the planet? We would have all but destroyed the NATO aliance by starting said iran war and also threatening to violently invade greenland and canada? Do you need a prescription for this severity of blindness
What is more the “Democrat are bad because Palestine” was the opposition’s framing. The argumeny was pretty unanimous that the policy on Palestine was going to cost the Democrats the election. The Democrats were bad because they knew full well they were going to choose to lose over changing that policy.
And that’s just tunnel visioning at only the Israeli policy.
If genocide is bipartisan, then the less bad choice is whatever collapses the US the fastest. You wouldn’t try to choose the leader of Nazi Germany based on who’s going to run the holocaust most effectively
exactly this. Trump is the weakest, least capable adversary the resistance could ever dream to have. Were you expecting the empire to fall without violence?
Yes, I can see that it would be demoralizing, and it was demoralizing. The Schumer/Biden wing of the Democrats deserves to be cast into the bonfire of the vanities, they are completely useless. And while this might sound sarcastic, I truly believe they have ended their usefulness, if they ever had much.
But we are talking about human beings and their lives. It may not make much of a philosophical difference to compare different stances on this senseless slaughter, but it makes eminently practical sense to save the lives you can. An American Presidential election was not going to produce much of a genocide-stopping president in 2024, and I hope 2028 does better, but there were distinct differences in approach and stance and collaboration with Bibi.
Case in point, look up “Gaza floating pier,” vs. “Trump Gaza resort.” it’s not about philosophical differences when you are starving.
If genocide is bipartisan, then the less bad choice is whatever collapses the US the fastest. You wouldn’t try to choose the leader of Nazi Germany based on who’s going to run the holocaust most effectively
Case in point, look up “Gaza floating pier,” vs. “Trump Gaza resort.” it’s not about philosophical differences when you are starving.
the floating pier from day one was to have israeli guards at the end of it. It was a pretend situation where Israel could have instead just opened one gate into gaza instead for the exact same effect. Its a transparent and idiotic PR game and always was, and evidently you fell for it. Or you’re pushing the same braindead propoganda narrative with a straight face. How was the pier any different than a gate on land?
Fuck demoralizing. People made a conscious choice to screw the United States for ar least 3 more years…all because they were “demoralized”. So how bad are they depressed right now? “I’M DEMORALIZED…SO I’LL DO SOMETHING THAT WILL MAKE IT EXPONENTIALLY WORSE.” Here in the south, we call that “short bus thinking”. Yeah, I called those people the terrible R word…maybe I’ll take it back when they stop acting that way. And I don’t give a fuck. They fucked up. They can own it or cry into their lattes. I REALLY don’t give a fuck about their whining.
Your shitty system will always produce fascism as long as you don’t hold the slightly less fascist party accountable. Last election the dems threw immigrants and palestinians under the bus in the name of ‘appeasing the center’ next election it will be trans people that will lose all political support and some time afterwards the dems will fold on womens rights in their stupid attempt to become the republicans lite edition.
Making logical points weighing up two distinct yet similar stances on genocide is only going to suppress voter turnout.
It’s the same as any other US election. We always have two shit sandwich options forced by the parties. There’s always some absolutely fucked position they’re both going to work towards and it is just a factor of which is less bad.
There have been other genocides the US has supported for decades elsewhere that go one gave a fuck about. The issues in Gaza aren’t new, they’re just more visible right now because of Israeli lobbying, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the US.
We always have two shit sandwich options forced by the parties.
That stopped working in 2016. Biden only won because he lied and said he wanted to do a bunch of stuff the left wanted. Harris was a return to “we’re shitty, we love it, fuck you” politics.
Answer the fucking core of their point, instead going on random tangents. How the fuck is Trump better for the palestinians you supposedly care about than the Democrats? How did NOT having a spineless democrat in office help them? What did all you moral purists do in those 4-ish hours once every 4 years where you didn’t vote? How many walmarts have been fire bombed?
I fucking voted. For harris. Genocidal shit like you loves to make the assumption that anyone who doesn’t love genocide and nothing else like you do must be a trumper or a nonvoter.
Or you don’t care how anyone voted because you got your only policy either way, and just can’t stand it when anyone has a problem with genocide.
Yes. Because what so many folks can’t seem to get is that different people are different. And they have different ethics.
This is literally the entire point of the trolley problem. Yes, you can stick your fingers in your ears and say, “always pull the lever for the track with fewer people on it.” But that’s just not how ethics works. Utilitarian ethics is one way to live life, but utilitarians have this incredibly annoying habit of assuming that theirs is the only valid ethical system, and that you’re a complete moron if you follow any other school of thought.
You’re demonstrating a utilitarian sense of ethics. One who follows a respect-for-persons belief system would say that the ends don’t justify the means. That it’s not fine to pull the trolley lever, even if that would result in a net saving of lives. That it’s fine to vote to hold people accountable, even if that will objectively result in net material harm. It’s not always about the greatest good for the greatest number. Otherwise, for example, we would never put any research dollars into studying cures for rare diseases. Those dollars could always objectively do more good elsewhere.
Hell, even our criminal laws don’t follow a utilitarian sense of ethics. You can’t legally get out of consequences from killing someone by saying, “this on net saved lives.” Even if you can objectively prove it, you’re not legally allowed to kill people. It doesn’t matter if your murder on net saves lives, you’re still a murderer. If a gang kidnaps your two children and tells you, “you must go kill this other one person if you want them to live.” If you do that, if you go and kill that stranger to save your own kids? You will be charged and convicted of murder. You’re not allowed to kill one innocent person to save two innocent people.
Many people voted against or refused to vote for Kamala because they were trying to punish her and the Democratic Party. Voting is the only way we have of holding politicians and parties accountable. Millions of voters saw the horrific haughtiness and barbarity of how the Democrats acted around Gaza, and they wanted to punish them for it. It was about holding them accountable. It was about justice. Many voted against Kamala to punish her for supporting genocide. And if the likely thing came to pass, if Trump supported genocide as well? Well those voters would vote against him for the same reason. They vote to hold people accountable for past actions, not to speculate on future ones. Maybe not how you vote, but again, people are different and can use whatever ethical system they want in choosing their vote.
Again, you can argue greatest good for greatest number, but that isn’t the only system of ethics out there, and it’s not even the system that defines the foundation of our legal codes.
You’re demonstrating a utilitarian sense of ethics.
And even more specifically, act utilitarian ethics. This incredibly narrow focus on the immediate effects of actions on the individual level which they treat as the only possible way of looking at things with absolutely zero examination.
I’d describe myself as a rule utilitarian, and from that perspective, the rule of “Don’t support genocide, period” has a much stronger track record historically than, “Don’t support genocide, unless you have a really good reason.”
There is not one single time in all of human history that a stubborn refusal to support genocide has produced undesirable results. There are countless cases of people committing genocide because they see it as a “lesser evil” or “the only viable option.” “If we don’t kill them, they’ll kill us, so we have no choice, this is the lesser evil.” But not only are liberals utterly ignorant about moral philosophy, they’re also ignorant about history, or they refuse to learn from it.
Modern American liberals are the ideological inheritors of the people who took the more “progressive” approach to indigenous people of subjugating and forcibly assimilating them, killing any who resisted, as opposed to the people who simply wanted to exterminate them all (who now live on through republicans). It’s no wonder that they struggle to understand any perspective more progressive than “humane” genocide.
But this pretends that “not voting” is somehow a morally neutral inaction. It is a choice, the choice to support genocide EVEN HARDER.
This has very little to do with utilitarianism or deontology, and everything with retaining a feeling of moral superiority without having to actually do stuff.
You want a deontological take? Start bombing bridges or other infrastructure. Stop paying taxes, go to jail. Do literally anything that doesn’t amount to “not doing stuff makes me better, akshually”.
But this pretends that “not voting” is somehow a morally neutral inaction. It is a choice, the choice to support genocide EVEN HARDER.
I voted third party. Voting for someone who opposes genocide is not “supporting genocide eVeN hArDeR” than voting for someone who supports genocide.
This has very little to do with utilitarianism or deontology, and everything with retaining a feeling of moral superiority without having to actually do stuff.
I could just as easily say that your decision to vote for a genocidaire is just about retaining a feeling of moral superiority without having to do stuff. The difference is that I subscribe to a moral framework that says genocide is bad.
You want a deontological take? Start bombing bridges or other infrastructure. Stop paying taxes, go to jail.
The philosophy understander has logged on.
I’m not even a deontologist, dumbass. I literally just said that. Not that “bombing bridges” is remotely a “deontological take” to begin with.
The thing that really bugs me about y’all isn’t just the fact that you’re so ignorant, it’s that you’re so confident in your ignorance. You drop into intelligent conversations to not only spew a bunch of unexamined nonsense, but to tell everyone else how stupid and bad they are for not accepting your nonsense. It’s like talking to a MAGA person tuned down like 10%.
Imagine having to, because the most self-righteous, selfish people that possibly exist, opted to take “absolutr worst” over “bad”… and are still justifying it. Still lording thier moral superiority over the rest of us. Still incapable of grasping that thier self satisfaction came at a tangible cost to humans lives.
A big part of maturity, perhaps all of it, is recognizing that sometimes, you do need to degrade yourselves for others. Maybe not even to make things good for them, even just less bad.
Does it make me feel good to boil this down to an analogy like I’m talking to a 2 year old? No. It’s degrading to say. I expect it’s degrading to hear. But some people still don’t get it.
Yeah buddy I wasn’t saying not actively working against it was helping it. I meant literally helping it. That Administration was actively arming the Israelis and aiding in the genocide. Super weird that you didn’t know that.
Ok then tell me this, did Bibi like Biden? Did he want Biden to win? Did he think Biden let him do all he wanted? What did Biden say about Bibi in return?
Then you can look at things like Republicans voting to force continued sales of weapons
Tell me what Biden could’ve done that wouldn’t amount to starting a war?
You’re such a ghoul, actively helping people like Musk and Miller and ensuring Trump won’t put up obstacles for Israel murdering people in Lebanon and Iran. Because it’s more important to you that people get martyred against their will for your personal ideological purity. You knew the genocide would get worse if Trump won and you decided that would be better
Its illegal to send weapons or money to a country that is committing genocide. Biden could have simply said he cannot legally support Israel in any way and then just not. Instead Biden chose to lie for Israel aboiut 40 beheaded babies and provide unlimited diplomatic support, going so far as to bomb Yemen for resisting.
Democratic leadership knew this would decrease turnout, they prioritized unlimited support for Israel over winning the election.
Ok then if you’re right why was Netanyahu mad at Biden? Why did he want Trump to win? Because there’s no such thing as unlimited support and then wanting to remove the person you’re getting unlimited support from
Pretty trivially easy question.
Biden could have done a lot of things – vetoed funding and stopped running interference for Israel in the UN. And he could have called it a genocide and illegal on the world stage. Biden refused to call it a genocide. He could have called for an international force to stop the killing. He also flew recon missions for the Israelis with US drones over Gaza didnt he.
And “starting a war”? with who, Israel? Are you stupid? That war would last 5 minutes. Biden took massive amounts of money from AIPAC his entire career, and called himself a zionist all the time. Your pretending he had no choice and was simply a victim of circumstance is pure lies. He was massively bribed. A corrupt peice of shit genocide supporter. He would absolutely lose his case and be imprisoned if the US had done the right thing and signed onto the ICC. He belongs in an orange jumpsuit, sharing a cell with trump.
A war with iran. Because trump won we have now killed dozens/hundreds of iranians. People that would not have died if harris had won. So again what would biden/harris have done that would have amounted to starting a war. Are you stupid…
In terms of any actual metric, Biden was as bad if not worse than Trump in Gaza, but because BlueMAGA were engaging in mass genocide denial when it was their team doing it, they don’t realise.
You’re happy that the genocidal afrikaaner Musk got to kill hundreds of thousands, you’re happy Netanyahu expanded into Lebanon, you’re happy Trump got to give Netanyahu a fake ceasefire under which killings continue, you’re happy innocent Iranians are dying, all so you can claim you’re a good person for opposing Biden.
It’s easier to pretend you’re not responsible for assisting genocide than acknowledge it.
Trump’s win made everything worse and you’re happy that it is worse.
Did you warn anybody a win for Trump would make things worse? Did you do anything at all but just complain? Were you one of the people who said Trump couldn’t make it worse?
Because it sounds like you’re coping and projecting it, because maybe you could’ve had a president that wouldn’t have attacked Iran and that could’ve been reasoned with, and maybe even Trump’s convictions would’ve sent him to jail, but no, ideological purity was so much more important
You can see with your own eyes the parties are objectively not the same, as one of them supports Israel in killing innocent people in Iran while Israel expands their genocide to Lebanon too, but you absolutely refuse to acknowledge anything has changed
I mean, Trump at this time did say that he was going to put American boots on the ground in Gaza and pave it over to put up a luxury beach resort, so I wouldn’t say that they’re literally the same on this, but it’s a measure between actively supporting genocide and actively supporting and taking part in said genocide through direct military action.
Both parties love Israeli money, one just also happens to be run by a man who would love to wipe non-white ethnicities off the planet and build more towers to his inflated ego where they once lived.
American boots on the ground in Gaza and pave it over to put up a luxury beach resort,
Don’t see much difference apart from the jersey being worn by the settlers murderers and raiders, personally. The policy is ultimately the same.
run by a man who would love to wipe non-white ethnicities off the planet and build more towers to his inflated ego where they once lived.
And I’m sure Joe ‘Fund the Police’ Biden and his sidekick Harris are super concerned about non-white ethnicities. His enthusiasm for keeping the WMD’s flowing mid-genocide and mid-famine really sells me on his supposed empathy for them too.
This isn’t a zero sum game and this isn’t about defending a president who can at best be said to have kept the ship afloat and recovered some of the economic damage caused by Trump’s COVID response, nor the shitty option B the Dems forced on us without a primary. All of the above can be terrible. That’s always an option.
You see one jersey or the other, I saw two jerseys with twice the players on the horizon. The policy is the same now, but in 2024 during the election? When the guy who idolizes war mongers like Putin and who used to read Hitler’s speeches before bed (according to the biography of an ex-wife), and who had previously said about the Middle East that he wanted to “nuke the sand into glass” said that he wanted to invade Gaza and put a carrier just off the coast, I fully believed that the strip would be gone and the people who lived there a footnote in the history books written by Israel and the US by now.
Both suck. Both support genocide. But one was talking about accelerating it by an order of magnitude that didn’t leave nukes off the table. If they hadn’t replaced the big red button in the Oval Office with one that orders a diet coke, he would’ve slammed it the first chance he got.
Doing nothing to stop it, cheering on Universities and police that beat and punished protesters, refusing to let Ruwa Romman or anyone else anti-genocide speak at their convention, etc.
Their policy was bad and they were assholes about it at every opportunity. It’s honestly amazing she got as many votes as she did.
USians have been OK with crimes against humanity for decades. If Palestine had anything to do with Trump winning, then that’s due to propaganda, not them organically giving a fuck.
But why are we still pretending Trump even won when his senile rotting brain admitted they rigged the elections?
In terms of any actual metric, Biden was as bad if not worse than Trump in Gaza, but because BlueMAGA were engaging in mass genocide denial when it was their team doing it, they don’t realise
Who started a war with iran? Who went into another country and kidnapped their leader? Who is blowing up random boats in the carribean? Who bowed to north korean generals?
No biden os nowhere close to trump. Youre being willfully ignorant on this
Harris saw a 6M vote undercount relative to Biden. You can argue all the reasons why, but you can’t deny Democrats would have won if they’d been as popular in 2020 as they were in 2024.
It’s bizarre to see people insist this collapse in support has nothing to do with the policies of the party people stopped liking.
In the same vein, there’s a real hard November coming for the GOP this year. Their incompetence is going to cost them.
Except for being weak on Gaza, all of the democrats’ other policies were actually more popular and winning.
The problem is media lied and said their accomplishments belonged to Trump and that Trump’s failures belonged to them. He claimed he would deliver on the economy when his plan was to ruin it.
It’s bizarre to see people decide that the policies were unpopular when they always won as long as you removed the name from them. People wanted what democrats promised but trusted Trump would be the one who could deliver on the promises. That was all down due to lies and propaganda.
The big error made by Democrats is falling behind on outreach, and letting the corporate wing set the tone (fucking political consultants pushing them to “play nice”), all the other bullshit like telling them “they should’ve focused on the economy” is propaganda because the already did that and media refused to report on it
And now Trump no longer has people who can insulate him from consequences because he made too many much too big fuckups, so now average people know he actually never were a good businessman and never could deliver. But people are still not connecting the dots and directing the blame to the people who pushed the lies.
Exactly. And frankly, any person who blames the voters rather than the politician is a deplorable. You have to be the biggest dumbass on Earth to think that trying to shame voters is a good electoral strategy. Kamala lost because she was a terrible candidate. Her loss is her fault. Not the voters.
People want to believe the Republicans are massively worse. They aren’t. It’s a 10-15% thing at most. Most mainstream Democrats still support Israel, and they support the war on Iran. Even JFK ordered terrorist attacks on Cuban civillians. Dems are just fascists wrapped in a rainbow flag. The base need to reckon with this and actually force the party to address it rather than just acting like it’s not happening. Voting blue no matter who on the basis of harm reduction just enables it.
Is there any possible way to disagree with you that you won’t read as a Russian bot trying to undermine democracy?
It’s such a thought-terminating cliche that anyone can use to dismiss any criticism. I could just as easily say that you’re a DNC bot. Like, fuck critical thinking, I guess.
Why, of course there is! I certainly went from an early stance of “Israel is just defending itself from a terrorist attack” to “Alright, what they are doing to the civilian population in Gaza is clearly genocidal.” Then I went on to include what the “settlers” are doing in the West Bank with tacit sanction of the government under the same genocidal umbrella.
If the thesis is, “There was no attempt by Russian bots to sway public support of Palestinian civilians against the Democrats,” you’d have a hard time convincing me.
If the thesis is, “GenZ was well-informed about the plight of Palestinians before TikTok told them to look into it and shaped their opinion,” also unlikely to convince me.
If the thesis is, “There was no attempt by Russian bots to sway public support of Palestinian civilians against the Democrats,” you’d have a hard time convincing me.
There are bots out there trying to convince everyone of everything. That in no way means that you get to dismiss everyone voicing a particular viewpoint as being a bot.
If the thesis is, “GenZ was well-informed about the plight of Palestinians before TikTok told them to look into it and shaped their opinion,” also unlikely to convince me.
And you believe that the thing that changed was bots and not video evidence of genocide?
And you believe that the thing that changed was bots and not video evidence of genocide?
I do not. GenZ reacted with horror to something horrific. The issue is that they didn’t react with the same horror to horrific stories from before 2022 - settlers murdering Palestinian kids, soldiers walking away from torturing Palestinians, administrative detention that ran into the decades without any form of process.
Note that I do not blame GenZ for this. American media has been silent on these things, and is largely silent to this day. What TikTok brought (and it scared Washington insiders) is a view of the world as it is, not as it is viewed through the interests of the USA.
But, while I am very grateful that people started seeing the world outside of the propaganda machinery, I also realize that the recent exposure to the new information made the same people vulnerable to more propaganda and disinformation.
The includes the idea that Democrats were worse or comparable to Republicans when it comes to the treatment of Muslims. Which is the point of the post.
Trump’s very first act in office in 2017 was to pass the Muslim ban executive order. He didn’t care it was blatantly unconstitutional: it signaled a set of priorities, and discrimination and hatred towards Muslims of all kinds was the core of it.
I think that the Democrats are comparable to Republicans on treatment of Muslims. Democrats have supported and armed the Palestinian genocide, as well as waging war elsewhere in the Middle East. I wouldn’t say (and have never said) that they’re worse than Republicans, but they’re certainly comparable. I don’t think that “materially supporting a genocide and forcibly silencing dissent, apologetically” and “materially supporting a genocide and forcibly silencing dissent, gleefully,” are “incomperable.”
Is there any way for me to defend that position, or am I just automatically a bot, logic and evidence be damned?
You don’t need my stamp of approval, but you definitely don’t sound like a bot.
I think the current situation in the Middle East, compared to two years ago, very clearly shows that the two parties are not in any way comparable as you claim. You seem to pick both reacting wrong to the same situation (the Gaza conflict/Palestinian genocide) as proof that they are the same and I find that claim disingenuous.
Really? So democratic presidents don’t wage war in the Middle East?
They also weren’t just “reacting wrong to a situation.” They (both Republicans and Democrats) have caused this situation. Who was it who said, “If Israel did not exist, the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region?”
There’s been a near-complete bipartisan consensus on conquering the Middle East since at least Bush. Obama had every opportunity to withdraw and chose instead to double down, as well as orchestrating regime change in Libya. Everyone’s also been quietly bombing Yemen for decades.
The difference between them is mostly how concerned they are with legality and propriety. But both are committed to the imperial project of conquering the Middle East. Bipartisan support for arms to Israel to conquer Palestine (and Lebanon) The overthrow of governments in Libya and Syria. Direct invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s simply untrue to claim that this project started under Trump. Of course, Trump has mostly forgone the usual pretense of inventing pretexts for the aggression and is much more mask off about everything. But the overall goal is the same, Republicans are just dumber and more brazen about persuing it.
If you can’t see the moral difference between starting a war and not ending if fast enough for your liking, that is probably your moral failing and not that of my logic.
Because Trump was never going to wage a war? Lol.
Everyone but R could see it clear as day that Trump would have no interest at all in stopping his Zionist friends from their favorite pastime hobby.
I can’t fathom how any of those people thought Trump would consider Palestine anything but a future golf course. It’s been annihilated as a country and a people under Trump.
Most of the genocide and leveling of Gaza happened under Biden. But yes it continued under trump. Israel owns both US political parties.
So I dont know why you say “under Trump” – its the exact same thing under both Trump and Biden. We let Israel do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, to whoever they want, funded by us.
Seems you want to pretend Dems are better about it but I dont see how you can contrive any difference between 100% enablement and support.
In terms of Palestine? I don’t know how you yanked that interpretation out. If it doesn’t change with either party then the only reason to vote Trump is spite, followed by a leopard eating your faces.
In terms of everything else? Yes and no. I do know we would not have:
Further rollback of civil liberties of women
a tax plan (impending) intended to trap women in marriage
brown shirt army stalking people and performing street executions
war with Iran
gas prices that will continue to rise long after the war with Iran is done
A rollback on all solar and wind programs / projects
rollback of consumer protections re banks, credit cards, junk fees
halt on internet being made an essential utility
a tax plan that pushes billionaires toward becoming trillionaires
NIOSH gutted, good luck with work safety gear manufactured from here on out
Elections being gutted for midterms via the US postal service
Speech, now, you can’t even protest Israel without being arrested or booted.
Impending collapse of the dollar
Cuba
All those dead fishermen in South American waters
Further privacy erosion in favor of Google, META, Microsoft, etc
Disrespect and disenfranchising military vets, like Kelly and all the randomly expelled career generals in an attempt to make the military another brown shirt brigade
And I’m sick of listing this crap.
Arguably, 9 & 16 would probably still happen, but in slower subtler ways. The rest? Every spite vote or lack thereof made it happen.
I don’t like our two party system. But unless you have an actual solution that fixes it at the time of an election, then the spite play does indeed hurt all.
I’ve given up on changing republicans. We should either change the dems, or burn our entire government to the ground without much delay. Those are our options. Changing Dems means setting boundaries and sticking to them. And boundaries cant be only around during the primary. Dems either adhere to universal human rights for all or they lose in every way I can make them lose, thats my deal with them, they can take it or leave it-- I dont care if they – or you like it. Its not asking for much. and I’m willing to burn the democratic party and our stupid governmental system to the ground to get it, just like the zionists and their creatures are willing to do.
You want to wave a stack of lesser causes and pretend they compare at all to genocide? stuff like:
halt on internet being made an essential utility
oh my. You weigh that list of comparatively trivial bullshit against genocide of hundreds of thousands of innocents, journalist, and doctors huh. Well I think they dont even begin to compare, and it doesnt speak well of you that you’d even try to compare them. Kind of disgusting and self centered. Oh no, your gas is more expensive? You poor dear. This is “killing” you, I can tell. You’re basically being “genocided” by high gas prices and the internet not being considered a public utility arent you. Why cant you just stand up firmly for universal human dignity and human rights? Would that be so bad?
I think most republicans aren’t as locked into their beliefs as we have been made to believe, tbh. If they can change their opinions to match that of their leader, they have a fairly pliable belief system. I feel they are more likely to realign themselves for a leader that they see as a populist is the thing. So even a populist on the other side of the aisle would sway many of the Right’s current followers, since they’d be making promises for getting things done and giving them a proverbial backpat about it.
I think the wind is already blowing for a changed Democratic Party, it’s a wind that’s been blowing since Bernie really, but the old guard Baby Boomers have been in power for quite a while now. Demographics have been slowly changing so that the Baby Boomers don’t make up as much of the majority of voters anymore, so more progressive stances can take root.
Changing Dems is about focusing electing politicians that mirror the values you have more than anything. Promoting a different voting system that enables these more progressive voices would go a long ways towards getting them in office as well.
Functionally, it’s not possible to ‘start over’ so it’s smart to work within the space that we do have and make real change where it is possible to do so. Convincing people to change their stances is hard work, and the way power is split in a country as big as the US complicates things even further. Educating newer generations about why changes matters is important, and educating them about logical things they can do to build a better system, which does put human rights for all as top priority, should be a top focus.
Those people were too busy cranking their own holier-than-thou hogs to consider it. Which is why they’re confused (see OP) and retreating to their FSB-designed playbook.
I was fighting that battle right there alongside you, but yes the astroturfing was enormous. Sometimes I felt like I was the only sane person out there.
It helps to remember that there were hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of dollars going specifically to shilling for trump and putin and disparaging the democrats.
Right? Having to deal with all those bots showing all the times the democrats supported Israel’s actions and refused to support Palestinians and refused to call or support any sanctions or supported BDS
Must have been exhausting particularly since you had zero evidence to the contrary. I can see how that would be an uphill battle when facts aren’t on your side.
You do realize your tactic here was literally the same tactic as when MAGAs call something “fake news,” right? Uncannily identical.
I tagged loads of accounts at the time, thinking they were just bots or plants, but a couple are still around and now I think maybe they’re just well-meaning morons who couldn’t quite figure out the implications…
Yes, some well-intentioned people may have been duped into spreading the propaganda. The goal of astroturfing is to convince ordinary people of what they’re shilling, ultimately getting others to repeat it.
The trolls only inject the mind virus, but once it’s accepted by an (un)critical mass, it kinds takes on a life of its own…
It’s weird though. One of the accounts I tagged has just become more and more reasonable and I feel like. Idk. They certainly weren’t all bad or deceptive people – and being mean to and about them won’t really help them figure it out … OTOH fuck ppl who do stupid shit because they’re too proud to accept inherent complicity in the evils of the lesser.
The amount of that shit that was going on even here showed it worked. Pretty much all of those accounts are silent now. Shows you how the russian bots poisoned the election.
Well the reality isn’t much better. They put a candidate in that couldn’t beat anyone in the primaries, but was added because Biden wanted to run again.
If you are talking about Harris, then Biden did even worse: he pulled out way too late, refused to give her a chance to make a case (she probably preferred it that way, too), and then forbade her from straying even an inch from his party line.
Or maybe we should demand politicians who aren’t genocidal? I’m not a Russian bot, I just refuse to follow the same bullshit “vote blue no matter who” harm reduction narrative that just leads to infinitely more harm in the long run.
I’ve been warning people about what was coming as far back as 2010, when I was a teenager. I have been telling people that “vote blue no matter who” would lead here, and people just derided me, called me a troll, I have been told endlessly that I’m making a slippery slope argument.
When Bernie’s would-be victory was transmuted into Hillary’s defeat, that should have been a wake-up call for you. Your politicians are playing you like a fiddle. They would rather have fascism than even the mildest social democracy.
History has vindicated leftists, again and again and again and again. Liberals, centrists, democrats, they are either in denial, or they’re fully onboard with fascism.
Please, for once, listen to us. You need to help us stop this shit. We can’t just keep going on voting for the lesser evil forever.
Organize, protest and elect. Emphasis on organize and protest.
Get as involved as you can with activist efforts locally.
Organize, network, focus on building solidarity. Join or form a union. Join the IWW.
Vote at primaries and elections for the best candidate, even if you doubt they can win.
Don’t punch down.
Don’t punch left.
Educate yourself, politically.
Push for voting reform and for anything that breaks the two-party system.
We’ll still be skidding in 2028, and 2032, and 2036, and 2040, and so on. Picture yourself in 2044 making this same argument. Now we’re arguing about Hitler (D) who wants to put trans people in prison, and Hitler ® who wants to put trans people in death camps. Both candidates are willing to launch a nuclear weapon in behalf of Israel. The car is already skidding, it’s too late to change things. If you don’t vote for Hitler (D), then you’re letting Hitler ® win.
Flash back to 2026. “Vote blue no matter who” just means democrats don’t have to appeal to leftists at all. In order to win, they just need to appeal to the right. Let’s force them to appeal to the left instead.
No. Voting in big elections is not the only action you take. This is a conflict with multiple fronts. You need to organize, talk to people, use every option.
Just abandoning the electoral front in this conflict is stupid
Voting in big elections is not the only action you take.
When did I say that it is? Please organize. Please vote in primaries. Do use every option. And also, force the Democratic party to understand that they have to appeal to leftists to get leftist votes, even when a conservative democrat wins a primary.
“Don’t vote until they learn how important we are” is how you join the third+ of the country that doesn’t vote and is therefore ignored by politicians.
I can name a few vulnerable minorities that have been abandoned by people who allowed republicans to take power, can you name any the democrats abandoned?
Democrats who ignored all the warnings about how failing to represent their constituents would result in a loss allowed republicans to take power. Not that democrats ever wield it when they have it.
Undocumented immigrants, when democrats permanently adopted republican border policy for a stupid momentary gotcha.
Trans people, when democrats not only said nothing, they actually ran anti-trans hate in their own ads.
Palestinian Americans. This has to be obvious even to you.
Women, when democrats preferred to keep the filibuster over codifying Roe.
I never said don’t vote. Vote in every election possible. If that >33% of Americans who don’t vote did, we would never have a republican president again.
And yet a large portion of them don’t vote because of what you said in your previous comment. They say that their vote won’t matter because nothing will change, and therefore don’t vote.
If we could convince them to vote out the Republicans and then hold the Democratic party over the fire until we can replace them with actually competent candidates (third party or not, we should remove parties period and enact ranked choice imo), then we might have a chance. But no conversation ever gets past the first hurdle of “vote blue no matter who won’t change anything.”
And yet a large portion of them don’t vote because of what you said in your previous comment.
Maybe. I wonder how many leftists don’t bother voting because of what I said, and how many don’t bother voting because democrats routinely fail to achieve anything. Biden had four years to put us on the path to getting healthcare, to raising the minimum wage, to seeing Trump tried for treason, to releasing the Epstein files, to ending that one genocide, and he just sat around with his dick in his hand for four years instead.
I won’t hold it against any leftist if they voted for Biden and feel burned. I did, and I do. Would Harris have been better? Obviously. Would she have done anything to mitigate the violence and misery the next republican would bring? Nope. The best she would do is delay some of it for a few more years before it came back worse, just like Biden did.
You can’t just vote out the Republicans. They’re going to keep running forever. As long as Democrats can get wins just by being slightly less evil than Republicans, there will never be a fire to hold them over.
Yeah you’re right, we should vote blue no matter who, even when the blue candidate does their best to appeal to right-wing voters. Surely this will have no bearing on the political leanings of democratic politicians in the future
I think the question is, what is the best way to get politicians who aren’t genocidal. Which is a specific case of the question of how you get change implemented.
I have seen people advocate for incremental change, and I have seen people advocate for revolution. The problem with incrementalism is that it looks like too little, and it’s uncertain in direction and can be reversed. The problem with revolutionism is that absolutely nothing happens until a cataclysmic change occurs, and then it’s absolutely not clear that the change is what people wanted in the first place.
Conservatives have achieved the monumental changes they wanted over the course of five decades. I find their goals repulsive, their methods disgusting, and their personalities (people in power) revolting. But I begrudgingly admit that their approach worked. They got absolutely everything they ever wanted, and their problem right now is that they, too, can’t live in the world they decidedly thought they wanted.
I don’t think people are saying you personally are a bot, but you’re falling for narratives pushed by bots. By allowing republicans to win this past election, infinitely more harm has been caused than even most people’s worst predictions and absolutely zero harm has been prevented. USAID is gone which will lead to millions of deaths abroad, crackpots like RFK Jr have been legitimized causing deaths to diseases which were effectively eliminated, disaster relief is being denied to blue states, and of course Israel has more freedom than ever before to do whatever they want to the Palestinian people.
Has any harm been reduced by allowing the republican party to have power? Can you acknowledge the harm that has already been caused by allowing them to have power?
I don’t think people are saying you personally are a bot, but you’re falling for narratives pushed by bots.
People call me a bot quite a bit, sometimes a shill too, or a Russian troll. In reality, I’m a gay autistic over-educated furry from Scotland with hot takes firmly backed by strongly held values - that we should always work to minimize suffering and maximize happiness for ourselves and for all living things.
I am not falling for anyone’s narratives. I arrive at all of my strongly held positions after a great deal of thought, consideration and evaluation. I am the person who speaks out against the popular narrative long before it becomes acceptable or even a matter of debate. I’m usually right years too early, sometimes decades. Maybe even centuries, on some topics, especially around youth liberation and anarchism. I have been an outspoken anti-zionist since 2010, for example.
I will never say that Trump winning was a good thing. It was a fucking tragedy. But if Kamala had won in 2024, she would have done nothing to prevent the material conditions which are responsible for the rise of fascism. Republicans, MAGA, and fascists would all see the continued failures of liberalism and the Democratic party to address massively growing inequality. They would become more and more reactionary, aggressive and extreme. What if, at that point, an intelligent, charismatic fascist leader appeared, and united that base? Someone who doesn’t say the quiet part out loud, who did all the shit that Trump did, but was able to convince Americans that it was necessary, or even good?
absolutely zero harm has been prevented
The full outcome of Trump’s premiership remains to be seen. Will the base of the Democratic party finally wake up and recognize that harm reduction narratives are a total and complete failure and demand more than the bare minimum from their electeds? Will an anti-zionist finally be elected in 2028? Or, dare I even dream it, an anti-imperialist? A socialist?
New York City got their first socialist muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, which one may argue was a leftist reaction to Trump.
We are also witnessing the collapse of the American Empire, massively accelerated by Trump.
We need to stop thinking in terms of harm reduction on an election-to-election basis, and start thinking in terms of the election after this one, at the very least. How can we use our vote not tactically, but strategically?
And remember, our vote is the weakest form of power we have. Our power comes from our connections and our labor.
Organize, protest and elect. Emphasis on organize and protest.
Get as involved as you can with activist efforts locally.
Organize, network, focus on building solidarity. Join or form a union. Join the IWW.
Vote at primaries and elections for the best candidate, even if you doubt they can win.
Don’t punch down.
Don’t punch left.
Educate yourself, politically.
Push for voting reform and for anything that breaks the two-party system
And if the dems had won on their appeasement of the fascists strat they probably would have fumbled the bag one or two elections after that and all of the stuff you mentioned would happen anyways just now with even less of a chance for the dems to right things afterwards because they adopted the mindset the republicans had a few years ago.
Why are you libs so averse to the reality of the ratchet effect?
So it is worth letting the bad things happen now because they probably would have happened anyway a decade from now? And winning an election against the republicans would have convinced democrats to adopt the republican mindset, which won’t happen after that mindset is proven to win elections?
‘Wouldn’t you have preferred the genocide with mock pearl clutching instead of glee’
No not really.
‘Wouldn’t you prefer a DNC and democratic establishment that believes it can win elections with genocidal conservative candidates that ignore the left wing of the party’
It sure seems like you’re setting up for some bullshit gotcha that’s really clever in your head. The sheer quantity of assumptions you have made about me for saying that I think genocide is bad is baffling.
I also tried to warn you genocidal fucks that she would lose if she kept supporting genocide. None of you wanted her to stop; you just wanted the forced silence of everyone who had a problem with genocide.
Because it means you at least tried to mitigate the harm. Most people who took that stance said that people shouldn’t bother voting at all because voting for either was supporting genocide.
No, that only exists in your head because you are a crazed rabid party zombie. Normal human being progressives think genocide is bad. It’s really fucking weird that you don’t.
Says the judgemental accusation throwing nut job. I’m a socialist with no love for the Democrats, only people who actually care about making things better.
Where did I ever imply in my comment that I think genocide is good? I merely explained that many people used the “both sides support genocide” as an argument for not voting or voting for Trump. Just like the weirdos who voted for Trump instead of Hillary in 2016 because actively supporting that dumpster-fire was somehow the best choice in their mind after Bernie got shafted by the Dems in the primary. Or the “both sides” centrism that’s actually just conservatism in a mask.
It was a campaign to sow voter disenfranchisement into progressives. And it worked. I saw it online, and I saw it in real life. That’s why they asked you who you voted for. Because actual people decided that the best course of action when forced to choose between genocide and genocide with an extra side of evil was to throw a tantrum, vote for neither and let somebody else choose which of the two would run the country, and then shame anybody who did vote for Harris for voting for genocide.
Ah, I see that when you are confronted with reality you just reject it so you can continue masturbating to how you’re the only person on earth who is smart.
It’s a failure of our history classes. People thought the US was better than that but they never learned we really aren’t and light genocide and pretending to feel bad about it is the best we can do.
You refuted the argument by providing all the evidence against it, I presume. You listed all the instances where leading Democrats supported Palestinians in the face of aggression, which are very numerous.
I mean, since that would be the way to remove any doubt
Yeah. I didn’t handle that well myself. But in all likelihood people were not going to change their minds anyway. It’s like trying to speak English to a duck.
fuck you back, war crimes supporter. You should have made the dems do the right thing and you didnt lift a finger to do that during the entire campaign season. Dont come pretending you fought the good fight now. You didnt.
I’m proposing that most people don’t care and even out of those who do, the total annihilation of the United States and the vulnerable people affected by it were a higher priority.
And posts like yours are a great argument for the existence of widespread paid Russian trolls intent on destroying the United States with the ridiculous notion that it was fine to let trump and other evil gop fucks destroy America because you were going to save Gaza by letting trump help them die faster. How’d that moronic “strategy” turn out? Gaza was saved? Also y’all sent a powerful message to Democrats. They truly learned their lesson. Such brilliance. But what do I know, I must be fake because I don’t lack the brain power of a farm animal like you frauds do. You’ve all taught me so much. I cannot wait to sabotage the next election which probably won’t even happen because of our blind moronism which led to trump as fully intended. We TOTALLY give a rats ass about gazans, that’s why we let trump murder the fuck out of them. It makes us so morally pure. Totally logical and not stupid as fucking shit to anyone who is capable of thought whatsoever!
I remember arguing for days, in 2024, that the whole “Democrats are bad because Palestine” thing was clearly a psyop by Russian bots trying to mess with the election. I really need to improve my persuasion skills. Like by a lot.
Pretty sure Democrats doing nothing to stop the genocide in gaza was a factor to their detriment in the election, bots aside
Even knowing that Trump was going to actively help Bibi? That’s the thing I didn’t understand: sure, the Democrats were not doing much to stop the slaughter, but from the previous Trump administration we knew Trump was going to actively help.
Imagine being so disingenuous that you actually believe (or at least want others to think you do) that we just didn’t know whether Trump would be worse than Harris on Palestine, Iran, and every other fucking thing possible for that matter. I never used to hold much creedence with the whole paid russian or chinese actors angle, even back in 2016. It is becoming more and more difficult to rationally explain how anybody actually living in the US could, with a straight face, make equivalency arguments between Trump and Clinton, Biden, or Harris. It does, however, seem like a perfectly rational act for foreign actors who just want to accelerate their replacement of the US as hegemon to take.
Ok, but you see how massively demoralizing this conversation is, right?
Making logical points weighing up two distinct yet similar stances on genocide is only going to suppress voter turnout.
It shouldn’t. It’s basic harm reduction.
One side probably won’t stop it, but they’re on our side so there’s a sliver of a cintilla of a chance we could pressure them into it.
The other side absolutely would not, vocally stated he would help accelerate it, and would laugh in our faces and do even more to accelerate it for no other reason than it made us mad.
The choice should have been obvious, even if I and everyone else would have preferred better options.
See people aren’t exclusively machines.
I know people who felt that both sides at least tacitly supporting the genocide was so depressing that for their mental health they basically checked out of politics.
No, that response isn’t helpful, but it’s a very real thing that happens to real people. They needed a candidate that cared that people’s lives were ending across the sea, and neither side offered that.
That hurt Kamala’s chances in a very real way, and might even be the deciding factor for Trump’s second term.
While you and I can look at this and go “Wow, that’s not logical, she’s way better than Trump”, the Democratic campaign should have had political scientists and psychologists that knew about this well-documented phenomenon. I imagine they did, and ignored it, because siding against Israel would’ve cost money.
So while it’s true that the choice was still objectively obvious, it’s also completely true that the Democratic campaign absolutely mishandled it, because this isn’t some new phenomenon, and group human psychology isn’t unpredictable. It’s also not the fault of those who didn’t vote because of that.
At the very least maybe the Dem party should have been smart enough lie publically that they would censor Israel and reevaluate US support of Israel (even if they wouldn’t actually follow through). It’s almost like losing is preferable to risking any AIPAC $.
But we’ve got a bunch of supposed leftists in this very thread talking about how they wouldn’t vote for these types of democrats. These are people that obsensibly are self aware enough not to let their supposedly so well informed morality be determined by feeling bummed out about their options.
I don’t expect miracles from the average, barely informed voter. I do fucking expect supposed informed leftists to not actively campaign against voting. I expect them to fucking understand this “obvious” situation. THAT is my main sticking point.
Yes, and white people get depressed about racism, so they just ignore what bums them out. Insane that a defense of online leftists amounts to “they just such smol bean, they too bummed for voting sad face”.
D and R parties both need independent voters to win any election. For example, even if every D voted for a D, they would lose without independents voting for them in significant numbers. This has been a political fact for many years.
So… why did the Harris campaign target REPUBLICAN voters (instead of Ds and independents)? They wasted a lot of vital time on that (“He doesn’t need to know who you voted for” etc), and they knew that they would lose if they did so.
She knew it too, Harris isn’t stupid. She took a knee.
I’m not fully convinced the conspiracy is that deep, but also if hard evidence came out saying so, I wouldn’t be surprised.
You don’t have to believe my word, but answer this question. You are a Democratic veteran. You KNOW for a FACT that you need Democratic and Independent voters to win. Simple mathematics demands that you do so to win.
Why, oh why, would you pursue the Republican vote? They’ve never done this before in a Presidential election. It can’t work. It’s never worked before, anyway.
This was discussed openly during the campaign, tons of Republican outreach and advertising with the Harris run… why?
I cannot think of any other reason, I would actually feel a lot better if there was a logical reason, somebody help my troubled mind
yep, and the Dem leadership still support israel no matter what they do. They learned nothing and will try to set up the same voter hostage situation in every vote from now on.
Right? Makes that other comment under this seem more valid.
Just because humans are vulnerable to certain psychological effects, doesn’t mean it’s not the fault of those who were effected by them. Humans are also vulnerable to stress eating. That doesn’t remove the blame from fat asses with no self-control.
And this person absolutely should have better self-control, whoever the fuck, sorry, TF she is.
And some candidates should be able to take a stand against genocide. Too bad you got your way and none were on the ballot.
Yes “my way”. As an American jew I’m totally not horrified by what my supposed homeland is doing, and I certainly don’t challenge anyone to call me a Jewish antisemite for saying “Fuck Israel”. And I also don’t still have to live with that complicit radioactive orange dementia patient as my fucking President because a bunch of pansy cocksuckers couldn’t get off their knees and go fucking vote against him.
We don’t live in a world of “should”, in the real world of course it is demoralizing and affects the vote turnout.
We all know the US government will back Israel no matter what… and the voters can only punish the incumbent party for doing so.
65% of Democrats don’t want to finance Israel. Two thirds of their own party, that’s massive!
Voter turnout will continue to fall; D and R parties will continue to lose voters (now down to 30% registered voters each) and the Independents will continue to grow (now up to 40% of voters).
Why? Because our major parties ignore what their constituents actually want, and we can only punish one party every term.
It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.
The same people in this thread blaming voters for how Kamala Harris ran their campaign were the same ones insisting we had to run Biden as the incumbent, and calling you a bit or a school if you said they needed to be replaced.
We wouldn’t have this outcome if the people who’ve made it their entire identity to blame voters had placed their frustrations with the party and demanded better, sooner, when it could have made a material difference.
The problem then being the electorate. The same group so many here want to absolve. You may not care about politics and want to ‘check out’ but it still cares about you and will still effect you even if you try to ignore it. In that vein elections will still happen and people you agree/disagree with will still be given power over you and your life. No matter how low the turn out a decision will be made with or without your input. Better to do what you can to give that input and make it the most useful it can be, before you get no input at all
Yeah, they should shut up and love genocide like you do.
How are all those iranians doing now after those protest votes. Their deaths totally worth the clear conscious of not voting
The very fact that the Trolley Problem exists as a thought experiment and there is still active discourse over the correct solution should tell you why people didn’t all feel that they had a responsibility to vote for harm reduction. You can’t expect an election that resembles a famously divisive philosophical thought experiment to turn out with everyone arriving at the same conclusion, and it’s pointless to dwell on the fact that everyone didn’t fall in line with what you think is obvious rather than adjusting to the reality and acting accordingly. That means getting candidates elected in primaries that aren’t going to put us in the same trolley problem come time for the general.
You can also put pressure on candidates mid-campaign to change posture.
I can tell you this, the Venn Diagram of the people itt blaming voters for the Democrats supporting a genocide in 2024, and the people who didn’t want Biden to step down is basically a perfect circle. Its also the same circle which shielded Harris from any critiques on her support for genocide.
If every election is a decision between the lesser of two evils and both evils become more evil over time then harm isn’t actually reduced in the long run. This is why harm reduction is a failing long term electoral strategy.
People preaching harm reduction whose candidates only ever increase harm over the last offering know this. They’re arguing in bad faith.
It absolutely is the best option, IF these are the only options. You don’t get to constantly pretend that there’s some obvious other solution without ever naming AND campaigning it. Basically, this entire thread is filled to the brim with online leftists hating on every possible option, propose fiire bombing walmarts, and then NEVER ACTUALLY FIREBOMB A WALMART.
It requires immense amounts of privilege to campaign for waiting for a better option to magically manifest.
And you’re so happy that there were no other options.
Imagine there’s an election with two candidates.
Both candidates have expressed that they will torture and kill you, specifically, r1veRRR.
One candidate will torture and kill you using environmentally friendly methods, the other will do so using fossil fuels.
Would you support the environmentalist candidate? Would you vote for them? Would you campaign for them?
Perhaps. But that’s not the world we live in. Demanding an electorate to suddenly change in a way it never has and start behaving like Homo economicus is only going to lead to further loses.
Honestly, people behaving like Homo economicus is how you get MAGA.
Think about it. Isn’t Trump’s pitch to voters ultimately an argument in rational self-interest? It’s all “I’ll make an in group and an out group. You’ll be in the in group. I’ll pull up the in group while pushing down the out group.”
Racism and sexism are rational. Or at least they are rational from those that benefit from them. Think about a white male living in the Jim Crows South. Your life was made soooo much easier by racism and sexism. There were whole career fields where they were the only quarter of the population that were eligible for them. They were automatically in the top quarter of society, simply by their race and sex.
Anti-immigrant zealotry is rational. If you’re a native-born US citizen working in the construction industry? Every legal or illegal immigrant being deported would cause your standard of living to soar. Economists would tell you that on net it will harm the economy. But if suddenly the pool of construction workers is cut in half, any US citizen who knows how to swing a hammer is now rolling in dough. That’s the rational terror of fascism - every time another group in the “first they came for” poem is liquidated, someone ends up with their property, their jobs, their place in the social order, etc.
You NEED to have a respect for persons built into your ethical framework, or else you can end up justifying evils of all sorts, all in the name of the greater good. Hell, Dr. Mengele slept well every night, content in the knowledge that he was doing the greatest good for the greatest number.
The side of genocide, oligarchy and fascism?
Nonsense.
Absolute nonsense, and the Palestinian Americans who voted ‘undetermined’ en masse during the Democratic primaries to send a message to Biden/Harris knew it too. The party made their choice between the people and an unpopular genocide. They chose genocide.
Hey guess what. The genocide got even worse under harris’ opposition. How did that work out for all the genocide joe non-voters. How have palestinians benefitted under those protest votes/non-votes. Not to mention all the dead iranians that wouldnt be had harris won
Congratulations on the furtherance of your only goal.
I was trying tp get people to vote for the person that wasnt going to start more wars in the middle east. Or kill random people in the carribean. Or put all trans people on a watch list. Or rail against any form of electrification. No the only ones who accomplished their hoals were those trying to get americans to think that the above candidate was the same as harris. You know realy morons.
That’s true.
It always does, because both ruling parties exist in service to Israel. And therefore, they have no impetus to do anything but escalate.
Had she been elected we’d be in exactly the same position.
Really wed be at war with iran? Wed be blowing up random boats and killing people in the caribean? We would have snatched up other country leaders? We would have completely destroyed world trade by tarrifing every other country on the planet? We would have all but destroyed the NATO aliance by starting said iran war and also threatening to violently invade greenland and canada? Do you need a prescription for this severity of blindness
What is more the “Democrat are bad because Palestine” was the opposition’s framing. The argumeny was pretty unanimous that the policy on Palestine was going to cost the Democrats the election. The Democrats were bad because they knew full well they were going to choose to lose over changing that policy.
And that’s just tunnel visioning at only the Israeli policy.
Yeah, the choice was bad or worse, and people chose worse. Life sucks sometimes, they need to grow up.
If genocide is bipartisan, then the less bad choice is whatever collapses the US the fastest. You wouldn’t try to choose the leader of Nazi Germany based on who’s going to run the holocaust most effectively
But you can’t deny a progressive Führer wouldn’t be better for us.
Sure the Jews, gays, and other undesirables may suffer but the far-right Führer made it bad for us as well and that’s unacceptable.
exactly this. Trump is the weakest, least capable adversary the resistance could ever dream to have. Were you expecting the empire to fall without violence?
I don’t want to cut off this gangrene foot because it will be unpleasant. Let’s just wait it out and see what what happens.
This was never a difficult decision and the ones that thought it was are fundamentally simple people.
Yes, I can see that it would be demoralizing, and it was demoralizing. The Schumer/Biden wing of the Democrats deserves to be cast into the bonfire of the vanities, they are completely useless. And while this might sound sarcastic, I truly believe they have ended their usefulness, if they ever had much.
But we are talking about human beings and their lives. It may not make much of a philosophical difference to compare different stances on this senseless slaughter, but it makes eminently practical sense to save the lives you can. An American Presidential election was not going to produce much of a genocide-stopping president in 2024, and I hope 2028 does better, but there were distinct differences in approach and stance and collaboration with Bibi.
Case in point, look up “Gaza floating pier,” vs. “Trump Gaza resort.” it’s not about philosophical differences when you are starving.
The Gaza floating pier was used to do warcrimes, then dismantled.
As planned.
If genocide is bipartisan, then the less bad choice is whatever collapses the US the fastest. You wouldn’t try to choose the leader of Nazi Germany based on who’s going to run the holocaust most effectively
BlueMAGA is a parody of itself
the floating pier from day one was to have israeli guards at the end of it. It was a pretend situation where Israel could have instead just opened one gate into gaza instead for the exact same effect. Its a transparent and idiotic PR game and always was, and evidently you fell for it. Or you’re pushing the same braindead propoganda narrative with a straight face. How was the pier any different than a gate on land?
Fuck demoralizing. People made a conscious choice to screw the United States for ar least 3 more years…all because they were “demoralized”. So how bad are they depressed right now? “I’M DEMORALIZED…SO I’LL DO SOMETHING THAT WILL MAKE IT EXPONENTIALLY WORSE.” Here in the south, we call that “short bus thinking”. Yeah, I called those people the terrible R word…maybe I’ll take it back when they stop acting that way. And I don’t give a fuck. They fucked up. They can own it or cry into their lattes. I REALLY don’t give a fuck about their whining.
Your shitty system will always produce fascism as long as you don’t hold the slightly less fascist party accountable. Last election the dems threw immigrants and palestinians under the bus in the name of ‘appeasing the center’ next election it will be trans people that will lose all political support and some time afterwards the dems will fold on womens rights in their stupid attempt to become the republicans lite edition.
Uhh trans people lost support last election. Or were you not paying attention to all the anti-trans legislation coming out.
Yeah, they had one party fighting against them and zero parties fighting back.
I’m glad monsters like you are suffering
It’s the same as any other US election. We always have two shit sandwich options forced by the parties. There’s always some absolutely fucked position they’re both going to work towards and it is just a factor of which is less bad.
There have been other genocides the US has supported for decades elsewhere that go one gave a fuck about. The issues in Gaza aren’t new, they’re just more visible right now because of Israeli lobbying, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides
That stopped working in 2016. Biden only won because he lied and said he wanted to do a bunch of stuff the left wanted. Harris was a return to “we’re shitty, we love it, fuck you” politics.
They were selling weapons to enable the genocide you’re downplaying by refusing to call it a genocide.
You mean they were giving weapons for free
Answer the fucking core of their point, instead going on random tangents. How the fuck is Trump better for the palestinians you supposedly care about than the Democrats? How did NOT having a spineless democrat in office help them? What did all you moral purists do in those 4-ish hours once every 4 years where you didn’t vote? How many walmarts have been fire bombed?
I fucking voted. For harris. Genocidal shit like you loves to make the assumption that anyone who doesn’t love genocide and nothing else like you do must be a trumper or a nonvoter.
Or you don’t care how anyone voted because you got your only policy either way, and just can’t stand it when anyone has a problem with genocide.
Yes. Because what so many folks can’t seem to get is that different people are different. And they have different ethics.
This is literally the entire point of the trolley problem. Yes, you can stick your fingers in your ears and say, “always pull the lever for the track with fewer people on it.” But that’s just not how ethics works. Utilitarian ethics is one way to live life, but utilitarians have this incredibly annoying habit of assuming that theirs is the only valid ethical system, and that you’re a complete moron if you follow any other school of thought.
You’re demonstrating a utilitarian sense of ethics. One who follows a respect-for-persons belief system would say that the ends don’t justify the means. That it’s not fine to pull the trolley lever, even if that would result in a net saving of lives. That it’s fine to vote to hold people accountable, even if that will objectively result in net material harm. It’s not always about the greatest good for the greatest number. Otherwise, for example, we would never put any research dollars into studying cures for rare diseases. Those dollars could always objectively do more good elsewhere.
Hell, even our criminal laws don’t follow a utilitarian sense of ethics. You can’t legally get out of consequences from killing someone by saying, “this on net saved lives.” Even if you can objectively prove it, you’re not legally allowed to kill people. It doesn’t matter if your murder on net saves lives, you’re still a murderer. If a gang kidnaps your two children and tells you, “you must go kill this other one person if you want them to live.” If you do that, if you go and kill that stranger to save your own kids? You will be charged and convicted of murder. You’re not allowed to kill one innocent person to save two innocent people.
Many people voted against or refused to vote for Kamala because they were trying to punish her and the Democratic Party. Voting is the only way we have of holding politicians and parties accountable. Millions of voters saw the horrific haughtiness and barbarity of how the Democrats acted around Gaza, and they wanted to punish them for it. It was about holding them accountable. It was about justice. Many voted against Kamala to punish her for supporting genocide. And if the likely thing came to pass, if Trump supported genocide as well? Well those voters would vote against him for the same reason. They vote to hold people accountable for past actions, not to speculate on future ones. Maybe not how you vote, but again, people are different and can use whatever ethical system they want in choosing their vote.
Again, you can argue greatest good for greatest number, but that isn’t the only system of ethics out there, and it’s not even the system that defines the foundation of our legal codes.
And even more specifically, act utilitarian ethics. This incredibly narrow focus on the immediate effects of actions on the individual level which they treat as the only possible way of looking at things with absolutely zero examination.
I’d describe myself as a rule utilitarian, and from that perspective, the rule of “Don’t support genocide, period” has a much stronger track record historically than, “Don’t support genocide, unless you have a really good reason.”
There is not one single time in all of human history that a stubborn refusal to support genocide has produced undesirable results. There are countless cases of people committing genocide because they see it as a “lesser evil” or “the only viable option.” “If we don’t kill them, they’ll kill us, so we have no choice, this is the lesser evil.” But not only are liberals utterly ignorant about moral philosophy, they’re also ignorant about history, or they refuse to learn from it.
Modern American liberals are the ideological inheritors of the people who took the more “progressive” approach to indigenous people of subjugating and forcibly assimilating them, killing any who resisted, as opposed to the people who simply wanted to exterminate them all (who now live on through republicans). It’s no wonder that they struggle to understand any perspective more progressive than “humane” genocide.
But this pretends that “not voting” is somehow a morally neutral inaction. It is a choice, the choice to support genocide EVEN HARDER.
This has very little to do with utilitarianism or deontology, and everything with retaining a feeling of moral superiority without having to actually do stuff.
You want a deontological take? Start bombing bridges or other infrastructure. Stop paying taxes, go to jail. Do literally anything that doesn’t amount to “not doing stuff makes me better, akshually”.
I voted third party. Voting for someone who opposes genocide is not “supporting genocide eVeN hArDeR” than voting for someone who supports genocide.
I could just as easily say that your decision to vote for a genocidaire is just about retaining a feeling of moral superiority without having to do stuff. The difference is that I subscribe to a moral framework that says genocide is bad.
The philosophy understander has logged on.
I’m not even a deontologist, dumbass. I literally just said that. Not that “bombing bridges” is remotely a “deontological take” to begin with.
The thing that really bugs me about y’all isn’t just the fact that you’re so ignorant, it’s that you’re so confident in your ignorance. You drop into intelligent conversations to not only spew a bunch of unexamined nonsense, but to tell everyone else how stupid and bad they are for not accepting your nonsense. It’s like talking to a MAGA person tuned down like 10%.
The US was doing it anyway before Trump2.0
My dad gave me $1 to seed a lemonade stand. Trump’s dad gave him billions.
Our experiences are equivalent.
Imagine comparing a genocide to a lemonade stand.
Imagine having to, because the most self-righteous, selfish people that possibly exist, opted to take “absolutr worst” over “bad”… and are still justifying it. Still lording thier moral superiority over the rest of us. Still incapable of grasping that thier self satisfaction came at a tangible cost to humans lives.
A big part of maturity, perhaps all of it, is recognizing that sometimes, you do need to degrade yourselves for others. Maybe not even to make things good for them, even just less bad.
Does it make me feel good to boil this down to an analogy like I’m talking to a 2 year old? No. It’s degrading to say. I expect it’s degrading to hear. But some people still don’t get it.
Not doing much to stop it is a weird way of saying actively helping it.
I see you too are actively helping it then. It’s your own words!
Yeah buddy I wasn’t saying not actively working against it was helping it. I meant literally helping it. That Administration was actively arming the Israelis and aiding in the genocide. Super weird that you didn’t know that.
Ok then tell me this, did Bibi like Biden? Did he want Biden to win? Did he think Biden let him do all he wanted? What did Biden say about Bibi in return?
Then you can look at things like Republicans voting to force continued sales of weapons
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/us/politics/house-bill-reverse-israel-arms-pause.html
Meanwhile; https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5429072-sanders-resolution-fails-israel-military/
Tell me what Biden could’ve done that wouldn’t amount to starting a war?
You’re such a ghoul, actively helping people like Musk and Miller and ensuring Trump won’t put up obstacles for Israel murdering people in Lebanon and Iran. Because it’s more important to you that people get martyred against their will for your personal ideological purity. You knew the genocide would get worse if Trump won and you decided that would be better
Its illegal to send weapons or money to a country that is committing genocide. Biden could have simply said he cannot legally support Israel in any way and then just not. Instead Biden chose to lie for Israel aboiut 40 beheaded babies and provide unlimited diplomatic support, going so far as to bomb Yemen for resisting.
Democratic leadership knew this would decrease turnout, they prioritized unlimited support for Israel over winning the election.
Cool. What’s the source, please?
Also, does it work when we’re the one doing it? And is it strictly genocide or is it general war criming.
Ok then if you’re right why was Netanyahu mad at Biden? Why did he want Trump to win? Because there’s no such thing as unlimited support and then wanting to remove the person you’re getting unlimited support from
Biden Administration Bypassed Congress on Weapons Sale to Israel
To start with, he could have, uh, not bypassed congress on weapons sales to Israel.
It’s certainly telling what he was willing to bypass congress to do after he couldn’t bypass congress for the agenda he ran on.
Pretty trivially easy question. Biden could have done a lot of things – vetoed funding and stopped running interference for Israel in the UN. And he could have called it a genocide and illegal on the world stage. Biden refused to call it a genocide. He could have called for an international force to stop the killing. He also flew recon missions for the Israelis with US drones over Gaza didnt he.
And “starting a war”? with who, Israel? Are you stupid? That war would last 5 minutes. Biden took massive amounts of money from AIPAC his entire career, and called himself a zionist all the time. Your pretending he had no choice and was simply a victim of circumstance is pure lies. He was massively bribed. A corrupt peice of shit genocide supporter. He would absolutely lose his case and be imprisoned if the US had done the right thing and signed onto the ICC. He belongs in an orange jumpsuit, sharing a cell with trump.
If you’re 100% right why did Netanyahu want to get rid of him?
Why has NOT A SINGLE ONE OF YOU responded to this question with anything but insults?
A war with iran. Because trump won we have now killed dozens/hundreds of iranians. People that would not have died if harris had won. So again what would biden/harris have done that would have amounted to starting a war. Are you stupid…
Who gives a fuck! You ghouls care more about your fucking parasocial kayfabe character drama than the lives of millions of people
Ok so then if you’re the one who cares so much about those millions, why are you actively helping the people who are trying to make their lives worse?
In terms of any actual metric, Biden was as bad if not worse than Trump in Gaza, but because BlueMAGA were engaging in mass genocide denial when it was their team doing it, they don’t realise.
Objectively wrong
https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/charts/
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Tell me who was president for all but 27 days of 2025 you illiterate moron
The deaths WERE HIGHER IN THE YEAR TRUMP TOOK POWER
did you not think anybody would check your claims???
What would you call Genocide Joe keeping the WMD shipments flowing, on time, without end, even during a manufactured famine?
This is one issue where both parties are literally the same.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/us/politics/house-bill-reverse-israel-arms-pause.html
Objectively wrong
I see you’re determined to not give Joe Biden credit for his record.
And that’s okay. It’s much easier to ignore his support for genocide than to acknowledge you voted for it.
You’re happy that the genocidal afrikaaner Musk got to kill hundreds of thousands, you’re happy Netanyahu expanded into Lebanon, you’re happy Trump got to give Netanyahu a fake ceasefire under which killings continue, you’re happy innocent Iranians are dying, all so you can claim you’re a good person for opposing Biden.
It’s easier to pretend you’re not responsible for assisting genocide than acknowledge it.
Trump’s win made everything worse and you’re happy that it is worse.
Not at all.
I did not vote for Donald, but if it makes you feel better to presume, go for it. It doesn’t matter so you may as well find a coping mechanism.
Did you warn anybody a win for Trump would make things worse? Did you do anything at all but just complain? Were you one of the people who said Trump couldn’t make it worse?
Because it sounds like you’re coping and projecting it, because maybe you could’ve had a president that wouldn’t have attacked Iran and that could’ve been reasoned with, and maybe even Trump’s convictions would’ve sent him to jail, but no, ideological purity was so much more important
You can see with your own eyes the parties are objectively not the same, as one of them supports Israel in killing innocent people in Iran while Israel expands their genocide to Lebanon too, but you absolutely refuse to acknowledge anything has changed
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I mean, Trump at this time did say that he was going to put American boots on the ground in Gaza and pave it over to put up a luxury beach resort, so I wouldn’t say that they’re literally the same on this, but it’s a measure between actively supporting genocide and actively supporting and taking part in said genocide through direct military action.
Both parties love Israeli money, one just also happens to be run by a man who would love to wipe non-white ethnicities off the planet and build more towers to his inflated ego where they once lived.
Don’t see much difference apart from the jersey being worn by the
settlersmurderers and raiders, personally. The policy is ultimately the same.And I’m sure Joe ‘Fund the Police’ Biden and his sidekick Harris are super concerned about non-white ethnicities. His enthusiasm for keeping the WMD’s flowing mid-genocide and mid-famine really sells me on his supposed empathy for them too.
This isn’t a zero sum game and this isn’t about defending a president who can at best be said to have kept the ship afloat and recovered some of the economic damage caused by Trump’s COVID response, nor the shitty option B the Dems forced on us without a primary. All of the above can be terrible. That’s always an option.
You see one jersey or the other, I saw two jerseys with twice the players on the horizon. The policy is the same now, but in 2024 during the election? When the guy who idolizes war mongers like Putin and who used to read Hitler’s speeches before bed (according to the biography of an ex-wife), and who had previously said about the Middle East that he wanted to “nuke the sand into glass” said that he wanted to invade Gaza and put a carrier just off the coast, I fully believed that the strip would be gone and the people who lived there a footnote in the history books written by Israel and the US by now.
Both suck. Both support genocide. But one was talking about accelerating it by an order of magnitude that didn’t leave nukes off the table. If they hadn’t replaced the big red button in the Oval Office with one that orders a diet coke, he would’ve slammed it the first chance he got.
“Hitler made the trains run on time”
Doing nothing to stop it, cheering on Universities and police that beat and punished protesters, refusing to let Ruwa Romman or anyone else anti-genocide speak at their convention, etc.
Their policy was bad and they were assholes about it at every opportunity. It’s honestly amazing she got as many votes as she did.
USians have been OK with crimes against humanity for decades. If Palestine had anything to do with Trump winning, then that’s due to propaganda, not them organically giving a fuck.
But why are we still pretending Trump even won when his senile rotting brain admitted they rigged the elections?
It absolutely was.
They didn’t send Bill Clinton to give primary speeches wagging his finger at Palestinian Americans for nothing.
Which is a fucking stupid line for people to draw when the opposition was advertising that they would actively do more in a worse way.
In terms of any actual metric, Biden was as bad if not worse than Trump in Gaza, but because BlueMAGA were engaging in mass genocide denial when it was their team doing it, they don’t realise
Who started a war with iran? Who went into another country and kidnapped their leader? Who is blowing up random boats in the carribean? Who bowed to north korean generals?
No biden os nowhere close to trump. Youre being willfully ignorant on this
None of that actually relates to what I said
Bullshit .you asked for metrics. Those are fucking metrics. Can you not read
Did you reply to the wrong post? None of that relates to what I said
I mean, the democrats ARE bad because Palestine. But the Republicans are worse, by A LOT.
Harris saw a 6M vote undercount relative to Biden. You can argue all the reasons why, but you can’t deny Democrats would have won if they’d been as popular in 2020 as they were in 2024.
It’s bizarre to see people insist this collapse in support has nothing to do with the policies of the party people stopped liking.
In the same vein, there’s a real hard November coming for the GOP this year. Their incompetence is going to cost them.
That’s just one big problem with your take.
Except for being weak on Gaza, all of the democrats’ other policies were actually more popular and winning.
The problem is media lied and said their accomplishments belonged to Trump and that Trump’s failures belonged to them. He claimed he would deliver on the economy when his plan was to ruin it.
It’s bizarre to see people decide that the policies were unpopular when they always won as long as you removed the name from them. People wanted what democrats promised but trusted Trump would be the one who could deliver on the promises. That was all down due to lies and propaganda.
The big error made by Democrats is falling behind on outreach, and letting the corporate wing set the tone (fucking political consultants pushing them to “play nice”), all the other bullshit like telling them “they should’ve focused on the economy” is propaganda because the already did that and media refused to report on it
And now Trump no longer has people who can insulate him from consequences because he made too many much too big fuckups, so now average people know he actually never were a good businessman and never could deliver. But people are still not connecting the dots and directing the blame to the people who pushed the lies.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/democrats-defined-progressive-issues/680810/
https://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/trump-wins-while-americans-vote-for-progressive-policies/
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/majority-of-americans-support-progressive-policies-such-as-paid-maternity-leave-free-college.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/07/politics/democratic-positions-majority
https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2022/12/13/progressive-issues-are-popular-issues/
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/power-dressing-progressive-economic-policies-conservative-clothes
https://www.forwardky.com/poll-voters-love-progressive-policies-despite-trump-win-tag-analysis/
Exactly. And frankly, any person who blames the voters rather than the politician is a deplorable. You have to be the biggest dumbass on Earth to think that trying to shame voters is a good electoral strategy. Kamala lost because she was a terrible candidate. Her loss is her fault. Not the voters.
If more people could know more than one thing can be true like you do, we’d probably have the energy crisis solved and relative peace globally…
People want to believe the Republicans are massively worse. They aren’t. It’s a 10-15% thing at most. Most mainstream Democrats still support Israel, and they support the war on Iran. Even JFK ordered terrorist attacks on Cuban civillians. Dems are just fascists wrapped in a rainbow flag. The base need to reckon with this and actually force the party to address it rather than just acting like it’s not happening. Voting blue no matter who on the basis of harm reduction just enables it.
Liberals: I can fix that voter, I just need to find the right logic combo in my persuasion.
Also Liberals: if voters were rational they would vote for the lesser evil.
Keep lecturing people, I am sure it will work this time around.
Is there any possible way to disagree with you that you won’t read as a Russian bot trying to undermine democracy?
It’s such a thought-terminating cliche that anyone can use to dismiss any criticism. I could just as easily say that you’re a DNC bot. Like, fuck critical thinking, I guess.
Why, of course there is! I certainly went from an early stance of “Israel is just defending itself from a terrorist attack” to “Alright, what they are doing to the civilian population in Gaza is clearly genocidal.” Then I went on to include what the “settlers” are doing in the West Bank with tacit sanction of the government under the same genocidal umbrella.
If the thesis is, “There was no attempt by Russian bots to sway public support of Palestinian civilians against the Democrats,” you’d have a hard time convincing me.
If the thesis is, “GenZ was well-informed about the plight of Palestinians before TikTok told them to look into it and shaped their opinion,” also unlikely to convince me.
There are bots out there trying to convince everyone of everything. That in no way means that you get to dismiss everyone voicing a particular viewpoint as being a bot.
And you believe that the thing that changed was bots and not video evidence of genocide?
I do not. GenZ reacted with horror to something horrific. The issue is that they didn’t react with the same horror to horrific stories from before 2022 - settlers murdering Palestinian kids, soldiers walking away from torturing Palestinians, administrative detention that ran into the decades without any form of process.
Note that I do not blame GenZ for this. American media has been silent on these things, and is largely silent to this day. What TikTok brought (and it scared Washington insiders) is a view of the world as it is, not as it is viewed through the interests of the USA.
But, while I am very grateful that people started seeing the world outside of the propaganda machinery, I also realize that the recent exposure to the new information made the same people vulnerable to more propaganda and disinformation.
The includes the idea that Democrats were worse or comparable to Republicans when it comes to the treatment of Muslims. Which is the point of the post.
Trump’s very first act in office in 2017 was to pass the Muslim ban executive order. He didn’t care it was blatantly unconstitutional: it signaled a set of priorities, and discrimination and hatred towards Muslims of all kinds was the core of it.
I think that the Democrats are comparable to Republicans on treatment of Muslims. Democrats have supported and armed the Palestinian genocide, as well as waging war elsewhere in the Middle East. I wouldn’t say (and have never said) that they’re worse than Republicans, but they’re certainly comparable. I don’t think that “materially supporting a genocide and forcibly silencing dissent, apologetically” and “materially supporting a genocide and forcibly silencing dissent, gleefully,” are “incomperable.”
Is there any way for me to defend that position, or am I just automatically a bot, logic and evidence be damned?
You don’t need my stamp of approval, but you definitely don’t sound like a bot.
I think the current situation in the Middle East, compared to two years ago, very clearly shows that the two parties are not in any way comparable as you claim. You seem to pick both reacting wrong to the same situation (the Gaza conflict/Palestinian genocide) as proof that they are the same and I find that claim disingenuous.
Really? So democratic presidents don’t wage war in the Middle East?
They also weren’t just “reacting wrong to a situation.” They (both Republicans and Democrats) have caused this situation. Who was it who said, “If Israel did not exist, the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region?”
There’s been a near-complete bipartisan consensus on conquering the Middle East since at least Bush. Obama had every opportunity to withdraw and chose instead to double down, as well as orchestrating regime change in Libya. Everyone’s also been quietly bombing Yemen for decades.
The difference between them is mostly how concerned they are with legality and propriety. But both are committed to the imperial project of conquering the Middle East. Bipartisan support for arms to Israel to conquer Palestine (and Lebanon) The overthrow of governments in Libya and Syria. Direct invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s simply untrue to claim that this project started under Trump. Of course, Trump has mostly forgone the usual pretense of inventing pretexts for the aggression and is much more mask off about everything. But the overall goal is the same, Republicans are just dumber and more brazen about persuing it.
Those bases aren’t just there because of Trump.
If you can’t see the moral difference between starting a war and not ending if fast enough for your liking, that is probably your moral failing and not that of my logic.
“People who oppose genocide can’t possibly be human: they must be foreigners”
You guys I just as fascist as MAGA you know
Because Trump was never going to wage a war? Lol. Everyone but R could see it clear as day that Trump would have no interest at all in stopping his Zionist friends from their favorite pastime hobby.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? Because none of that has any bearing on what I said
I guess I did. Sorry about that!
By “Palestine” do you mean “supporting genocide in Palestine”?
I can’t fathom how any of those people thought Trump would consider Palestine anything but a future golf course. It’s been annihilated as a country and a people under Trump.
Most of the genocide and leveling of Gaza happened under Biden. But yes it continued under trump. Israel owns both US political parties.
So I dont know why you say “under Trump” – its the exact same thing under both Trump and Biden. We let Israel do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, to whoever they want, funded by us.
Seems you want to pretend Dems are better about it but I dont see how you can contrive any difference between 100% enablement and support.
In terms of Palestine? I don’t know how you yanked that interpretation out. If it doesn’t change with either party then the only reason to vote Trump is spite, followed by a leopard eating your faces.
In terms of everything else? Yes and no. I do know we would not have:
Arguably, 9 & 16 would probably still happen, but in slower subtler ways. The rest? Every spite vote or lack thereof made it happen.
I don’t like our two party system. But unless you have an actual solution that fixes it at the time of an election, then the spite play does indeed hurt all.
I’ve given up on changing republicans. We should either change the dems, or burn our entire government to the ground without much delay. Those are our options. Changing Dems means setting boundaries and sticking to them. And boundaries cant be only around during the primary. Dems either adhere to universal human rights for all or they lose in every way I can make them lose, thats my deal with them, they can take it or leave it-- I dont care if they – or you like it. Its not asking for much. and I’m willing to burn the democratic party and our stupid governmental system to the ground to get it, just like the zionists and their creatures are willing to do.
You want to wave a stack of lesser causes and pretend they compare at all to genocide? stuff like:
oh my. You weigh that list of comparatively trivial bullshit against genocide of hundreds of thousands of innocents, journalist, and doctors huh. Well I think they dont even begin to compare, and it doesnt speak well of you that you’d even try to compare them. Kind of disgusting and self centered. Oh no, your gas is more expensive? You poor dear. This is “killing” you, I can tell. You’re basically being “genocided” by high gas prices and the internet not being considered a public utility arent you. Why cant you just stand up firmly for universal human dignity and human rights? Would that be so bad?
I think most republicans aren’t as locked into their beliefs as we have been made to believe, tbh. If they can change their opinions to match that of their leader, they have a fairly pliable belief system. I feel they are more likely to realign themselves for a leader that they see as a populist is the thing. So even a populist on the other side of the aisle would sway many of the Right’s current followers, since they’d be making promises for getting things done and giving them a proverbial backpat about it.
I think the wind is already blowing for a changed Democratic Party, it’s a wind that’s been blowing since Bernie really, but the old guard Baby Boomers have been in power for quite a while now. Demographics have been slowly changing so that the Baby Boomers don’t make up as much of the majority of voters anymore, so more progressive stances can take root.
Changing Dems is about focusing electing politicians that mirror the values you have more than anything. Promoting a different voting system that enables these more progressive voices would go a long ways towards getting them in office as well.
Functionally, it’s not possible to ‘start over’ so it’s smart to work within the space that we do have and make real change where it is possible to do so. Convincing people to change their stances is hard work, and the way power is split in a country as big as the US complicates things even further. Educating newer generations about why changes matters is important, and educating them about logical things they can do to build a better system, which does put human rights for all as top priority, should be a top focus.
deleted by creator
That happened under Biden, you were just a genocide denying ghoul when your team was doing it
Those people were too busy cranking their own holier-than-thou hogs to consider it. Which is why they’re confused (see OP) and retreating to their FSB-designed playbook.
There is no justification for supporting genocide
Agreed. And look - double extra genocide now. So. What did we learn.
There’s nothing double or extra, it’s just affecting you at all now which is the only thing you actually give a shit about
Well, no and you’re wrong, and wrong again, so probably best to wrap it up there.
Anything’s possible when you make shit up kiddo
So you say
Solutions would be nice, instead of whatever this spite spewing rage scream is.
Yeah ask ‘em for solutions. See what you get.
Tap for spoiler
Nothing. Ever. Unless it’s something so generalized, so pie-in-the-sky that it’s positively painful to hear it espoused as a plan.
We provide solutions. You ignore them because they involve not supporting genocide.
I was fighting that battle right there alongside you, but yes the astroturfing was enormous. Sometimes I felt like I was the only sane person out there.
It helps to remember that there were hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of dollars going specifically to shilling for trump and putin and disparaging the democrats.
Right? Having to deal with all those bots showing all the times the democrats supported Israel’s actions and refused to support Palestinians and refused to call or support any sanctions or supported BDS
Must have been exhausting particularly since you had zero evidence to the contrary. I can see how that would be an uphill battle when facts aren’t on your side.
You do realize your tactic here was literally the same tactic as when MAGAs call something “fake news,” right? Uncannily identical.
I tagged loads of accounts at the time, thinking they were just bots or plants, but a couple are still around and now I think maybe they’re just well-meaning morons who couldn’t quite figure out the implications…
Still can’t.
Excellent username btw
I misread the spine of a book when I was 10 and looking for my first username. George Eliot is fucking phenomenal though and no regregts.
Yes, some well-intentioned people may have been duped into spreading the propaganda. The goal of astroturfing is to convince ordinary people of what they’re shilling, ultimately getting others to repeat it.
The trolls only inject the mind virus, but once it’s accepted by an (un)critical mass, it kinds takes on a life of its own…
Damn, I wonder how you managed to lose the election with such compelling messages as “anyone who opposes us has been mind controlled by foreigners”
Centrists didn’t lose the election. They circumvented the only one they cared about winning: the primaries.
Indeed; their only objective is to suppress the left. The election was a huge win for them
It’s weird though. One of the accounts I tagged has just become more and more reasonable and I feel like. Idk. They certainly weren’t all bad or deceptive people – and being mean to and about them won’t really help them figure it out … OTOH fuck ppl who do stupid shit because they’re too proud to accept inherent complicity in the evils of the lesser.
The amount of that shit that was going on even here showed it worked. Pretty much all of those accounts are silent now. Shows you how the russian bots poisoned the election.
Some people still deny it, but it’s not like you need to wear a tinfoil hat to realize it. The kremlin openly admits to doing this shit.
Scroll up, there’s more than a few sunk cost fallaciors still about.
Yea I just noticed after I posted…
“People who oppose genocide can’t possibly be human: they must be foreigners”
You guys I just as fascist as MAGA you know
“People who oppose genocide can’t possibly be human: they must be foreigners”
You guys I just as fascist as MAGA you know
Well the reality isn’t much better. They put a candidate in that couldn’t beat anyone in the primaries, but was added because Biden wanted to run again.
If you are talking about Harris, then Biden did even worse: he pulled out way too late, refused to give her a chance to make a case (she probably preferred it that way, too), and then forbade her from straying even an inch from his party line.
Not true. Moving to his right and promising to appoint a republican to her cabinet was just fine.
I mean thats basically what I was already saying…
Or maybe we should demand politicians who aren’t genocidal? I’m not a Russian bot, I just refuse to follow the same bullshit “vote blue no matter who” harm reduction narrative that just leads to infinitely more harm in the long run.
The car is already skidding on the ice. Saying “we should have taken the subway” is not useful at that point in time.
I’ve been warning people about what was coming as far back as 2010, when I was a teenager. I have been telling people that “vote blue no matter who” would lead here, and people just derided me, called me a troll, I have been told endlessly that I’m making a slippery slope argument.
When Bernie’s would-be victory was transmuted into Hillary’s defeat, that should have been a wake-up call for you. Your politicians are playing you like a fiddle. They would rather have fascism than even the mildest social democracy.
History has vindicated leftists, again and again and again and again. Liberals, centrists, democrats, they are either in denial, or they’re fully onboard with fascism.
Please, for once, listen to us. You need to help us stop this shit. We can’t just keep going on voting for the lesser evil forever.
Organize, protest and elect. Emphasis on organize and protest.
The advice was given with plenty of time to follow it, they chose not to
We’ll still be skidding in 2028, and 2032, and 2036, and 2040, and so on. Picture yourself in 2044 making this same argument. Now we’re arguing about Hitler (D) who wants to put trans people in prison, and Hitler ® who wants to put trans people in death camps. Both candidates are willing to launch a nuclear weapon in behalf of Israel. The car is already skidding, it’s too late to change things. If you don’t vote for Hitler (D), then you’re letting Hitler ® win.
Flash back to 2026. “Vote blue no matter who” just means democrats don’t have to appeal to leftists at all. In order to win, they just need to appeal to the right. Let’s force them to appeal to the left instead.
No. Voting in big elections is not the only action you take. This is a conflict with multiple fronts. You need to organize, talk to people, use every option.
Just abandoning the electoral front in this conflict is stupid
When did I say that it is? Please organize. Please vote in primaries. Do use every option. And also, force the Democratic party to understand that they have to appeal to leftists to get leftist votes, even when a conservative democrat wins a primary.
“Don’t vote until they learn how important we are” is how you join the third+ of the country that doesn’t vote and is therefore ignored by politicians.
Republicans don’t vote for democrats, but democrats will abandon every last principle and every last vulnerable minority chasing their votes.
I can name a few vulnerable minorities that have been abandoned by people who allowed republicans to take power, can you name any the democrats abandoned?
Democrats who ignored all the warnings about how failing to represent their constituents would result in a loss allowed republicans to take power. Not that democrats ever wield it when they have it.
Undocumented immigrants, when democrats permanently adopted republican border policy for a stupid momentary gotcha.
Trans people, when democrats not only said nothing, they actually ran anti-trans hate in their own ads.
Palestinian Americans. This has to be obvious even to you.
Women, when democrats preferred to keep the filibuster over codifying Roe.
I never said don’t vote. Vote in every election possible. If that >33% of Americans who don’t vote did, we would never have a republican president again.
And yet a large portion of them don’t vote because of what you said in your previous comment. They say that their vote won’t matter because nothing will change, and therefore don’t vote.
If we could convince them to vote out the Republicans and then hold the Democratic party over the fire until we can replace them with actually competent candidates (third party or not, we should remove parties period and enact ranked choice imo), then we might have a chance. But no conversation ever gets past the first hurdle of “vote blue no matter who won’t change anything.”
Maybe pretend they’re republicans and do what they want?
Maybe. I wonder how many leftists don’t bother voting because of what I said, and how many don’t bother voting because democrats routinely fail to achieve anything. Biden had four years to put us on the path to getting healthcare, to raising the minimum wage, to seeing Trump tried for treason, to releasing the Epstein files, to ending that one genocide, and he just sat around with his dick in his hand for four years instead.
I won’t hold it against any leftist if they voted for Biden and feel burned. I did, and I do. Would Harris have been better? Obviously. Would she have done anything to mitigate the violence and misery the next republican would bring? Nope. The best she would do is delay some of it for a few more years before it came back worse, just like Biden did.
You can’t just vote out the Republicans. They’re going to keep running forever. As long as Democrats can get wins just by being slightly less evil than Republicans, there will never be a fire to hold them over.
Seriously, why do these people think politicians feel chastised by non-voters.
This is insane bullshit.
Also bullshit. Your version of fox news is terrible.
Yeah you’re right, we should vote blue no matter who, even when the blue candidate does their best to appeal to right-wing voters. Surely this will have no bearing on the political leanings of democratic politicians in the future
I used to agree, but after seeing how lefties will refuse to vote for the most pointless reasons, I can see why they thought that strategy was better.
It wasn’t, of course, but I can see how their math said that.
probably because the Democrat party is not a Leftist party. Leftists owe the Democrats nothing as the Democrats have long been the center-right party.
You literally cannot imagine why anyone doesn’t love genocide.
I think the question is, what is the best way to get politicians who aren’t genocidal. Which is a specific case of the question of how you get change implemented.
I have seen people advocate for incremental change, and I have seen people advocate for revolution. The problem with incrementalism is that it looks like too little, and it’s uncertain in direction and can be reversed. The problem with revolutionism is that absolutely nothing happens until a cataclysmic change occurs, and then it’s absolutely not clear that the change is what people wanted in the first place.
Conservatives have achieved the monumental changes they wanted over the course of five decades. I find their goals repulsive, their methods disgusting, and their personalities (people in power) revolting. But I begrudgingly admit that their approach worked. They got absolutely everything they ever wanted, and their problem right now is that they, too, can’t live in the world they decidedly thought they wanted.
I can tell you with great certainty that voting for genocidal politicians is the worst way of getting politicians who aren’t genocidal.
My advice, as always, is to organize, protest, and elect, with a greater emphasis on organizing and protesting.
The problem with incrementalism is that it’s often just a bullshit cover for doing nothing at all.
I don’t think people are saying you personally are a bot, but you’re falling for narratives pushed by bots. By allowing republicans to win this past election, infinitely more harm has been caused than even most people’s worst predictions and absolutely zero harm has been prevented. USAID is gone which will lead to millions of deaths abroad, crackpots like RFK Jr have been legitimized causing deaths to diseases which were effectively eliminated, disaster relief is being denied to blue states, and of course Israel has more freedom than ever before to do whatever they want to the Palestinian people.
Has any harm been reduced by allowing the republican party to have power? Can you acknowledge the harm that has already been caused by allowing them to have power?
People call me a bot quite a bit, sometimes a shill too, or a Russian troll. In reality, I’m a gay autistic over-educated furry from Scotland with hot takes firmly backed by strongly held values - that we should always work to minimize suffering and maximize happiness for ourselves and for all living things.
I am not falling for anyone’s narratives. I arrive at all of my strongly held positions after a great deal of thought, consideration and evaluation. I am the person who speaks out against the popular narrative long before it becomes acceptable or even a matter of debate. I’m usually right years too early, sometimes decades. Maybe even centuries, on some topics, especially around youth liberation and anarchism. I have been an outspoken anti-zionist since 2010, for example.
I will never say that Trump winning was a good thing. It was a fucking tragedy. But if Kamala had won in 2024, she would have done nothing to prevent the material conditions which are responsible for the rise of fascism. Republicans, MAGA, and fascists would all see the continued failures of liberalism and the Democratic party to address massively growing inequality. They would become more and more reactionary, aggressive and extreme. What if, at that point, an intelligent, charismatic fascist leader appeared, and united that base? Someone who doesn’t say the quiet part out loud, who did all the shit that Trump did, but was able to convince Americans that it was necessary, or even good?
The full outcome of Trump’s premiership remains to be seen. Will the base of the Democratic party finally wake up and recognize that harm reduction narratives are a total and complete failure and demand more than the bare minimum from their electeds? Will an anti-zionist finally be elected in 2028? Or, dare I even dream it, an anti-imperialist? A socialist?
New York City got their first socialist muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, which one may argue was a leftist reaction to Trump.
We are also witnessing the collapse of the American Empire, massively accelerated by Trump.
We need to stop thinking in terms of harm reduction on an election-to-election basis, and start thinking in terms of the election after this one, at the very least. How can we use our vote not tactically, but strategically?
And remember, our vote is the weakest form of power we have. Our power comes from our connections and our labor.
Organize, protest and elect. Emphasis on organize and protest.
Democrats should have listened to people who were telling them they would lose if they kept supporting genocide.
They were warned. They knew. They wanted genocide so badly they were willing to botch the election to make sure it kept going.
And if the dems had won on their appeasement of the fascists strat they probably would have fumbled the bag one or two elections after that and all of the stuff you mentioned would happen anyways just now with even less of a chance for the dems to right things afterwards because they adopted the mindset the republicans had a few years ago.
Why are you libs so averse to the reality of the ratchet effect?
So it is worth letting the bad things happen now because they probably would have happened anyway a decade from now? And winning an election against the republicans would have convinced democrats to adopt the republican mindset, which won’t happen after that mindset is proven to win elections?
Or maybe I just don’t like genocide.
Liberals:
So how’s that panning out for you now?
‘Wouldn’t you have preferred the genocide with mock pearl clutching instead of glee’
No not really.
‘Wouldn’t you prefer a DNC and democratic establishment that believes it can win elections with genocidal conservative candidates that ignore the left wing of the party’
Also no.
I don’t understand the question. I still don’t like genocide. Do you?
So in your opinion did you get less genocide?
It sure seems like you’re setting up for some bullshit gotcha that’s really clever in your head. The sheer quantity of assumptions you have made about me for saying that I think genocide is bad is baffling.
Genocide is bad. Say it with me.
Seems you can’t answer a simple question without feeling persecuted.
Blocked
Do you like genocide or not? Answer the question
I do not need to respond to you
Blocked.
Did your demands for fealty to netanyahu by proxy result in less genocide?
Blocked.
I blasphemed against the religion of every centrist, so he blocked me.
You’re losing and you know it, but you’re too stupid to understand why
Blocked
So you actively campaigned for more of it. Sounds like you fucked yourself. Is that so hard to understand?
“see, by saying anything bad at all about genocide, you’re actually at fault for genocide!” - people who demand silent acquiescence to the genocidal.
When did I do that? Show me on the doll.
Funny how you can only win arguments against your imaginary friends.
When you failed to do the one thing to defeat literal demented fascism.
That’s when. You want to tell us you voted for Harris now? No? Hmm.
Again, are you illiterate?
https://threadiverse.link/sh.itjust.works/comment/24668272
I voted for Harris.
I also tried to warn you genocidal fucks that she would lose if she kept supporting genocide. None of you wanted her to stop; you just wanted the forced silence of everyone who had a problem with genocide.
And still do.
You stand for absolutely nothing, you deserve Trump and worse
It’s amazing your political beliefs aren’t more widespread. Probably just lots of oppression an that innit.
Tell that to the Lebanese.
Maybe all genocides are bad. Is that difficult to understand for some reason?
Who did you vote for in the 2024 US presidential election?
Harris. Why does that matter? Am I pure enough to think genocide is wrong?
Because it means you at least tried to mitigate the harm. Most people who took that stance said that people shouldn’t bother voting at all because voting for either was supporting genocide.
No, that only exists in your head because you are a crazed rabid party zombie. Normal human being progressives think genocide is bad. It’s really fucking weird that you don’t.
Says the judgemental accusation throwing nut job. I’m a socialist with no love for the Democrats, only people who actually care about making things better.
Where did I ever imply in my comment that I think genocide is good? I merely explained that many people used the “both sides support genocide” as an argument for not voting or voting for Trump. Just like the weirdos who voted for Trump instead of Hillary in 2016 because actively supporting that dumpster-fire was somehow the best choice in their mind after Bernie got shafted by the Dems in the primary. Or the “both sides” centrism that’s actually just conservatism in a mask.
It was a campaign to sow voter disenfranchisement into progressives. And it worked. I saw it online, and I saw it in real life. That’s why they asked you who you voted for. Because actual people decided that the best course of action when forced to choose between genocide and genocide with an extra side of evil was to throw a tantrum, vote for neither and let somebody else choose which of the two would run the country, and then shame anybody who did vote for Harris for voting for genocide.
I mean, that’s certainly how pro-genocide centrists interpret all criticism.
$20 says they’re not a US voter
Ah, I see that when you are confronted with reality you just reject it so you can continue masturbating to how you’re the only person on earth who is smart.
Well?
Are you illiterate?
https://threadiverse.link/sh.itjust.works/comment/24668278
I accept PayPal, Apple Pay, Cash App, or Venmo jackass.
What’s “Cash App”?
Oh so you’re literally a non-American troll. Way to out yourself dumbass.
Neither am I. But my country is one of many negatively impacted by the orange turd.
Right, which is the reason everyone gives when they hold forth at great length on the nature and vicissitudes of US politics.
Many are happy to be confused with a US voter. For reasons.
It’s a failure of our history classes. People thought the US was better than that but they never learned we really aren’t and light genocide and pretending to feel bad about it is the best we can do.
You refuted the argument by providing all the evidence against it, I presume. You listed all the instances where leading Democrats supported Palestinians in the face of aggression, which are very numerous.
I mean, since that would be the way to remove any doubt
Yeah. I didn’t handle that well myself. But in all likelihood people were not going to change their minds anyway. It’s like trying to speak English to a duck.
No, you did an amazing job of supporting genocide and nothing else.
Give up pursuing anyone of any argument these days. You’re better off calling them a dickhead and blocking them. That’s what I do now.
Fuck nonvoters and third party voters.
Perpetual loser
Good luck in 2028 lol
fuck you back, war crimes supporter. You should have made the dems do the right thing and you didnt lift a finger to do that during the entire campaign season. Dont come pretending you fought the good fight now. You didnt.
–the entire world
Who did you vote for? If it was not for Kamala Harris thenthen you’re responsible for the current globalshitshow.
And I’m going to block asshats like you. Keep screaming into a void.
Oh thank god, yes please dont ever reply to me again, thank you very much. Talking to people like yourself is not worth my time or energy.
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.1% of the entire world might be optimistic on your part
You are proposing that the world supports Israeli genocide of Palestine?
Are you some sort of bot or just a zionist?
He’s demanding it. He does at all times.
I’m proposing that most people don’t care and even out of those who do, the total annihilation of the United States and the vulnerable people affected by it were a higher priority.
Post like these are why i think “vote blue no matter who” are an Israel psyops.
So while they push the less evil narrative that is a plausible, they get to continue their genocide with both parties under their control.
convenient, isn’t it?
And posts like yours are a great argument for the existence of widespread paid Russian trolls intent on destroying the United States with the ridiculous notion that it was fine to let trump and other evil gop fucks destroy America because you were going to save Gaza by letting trump help them die faster. How’d that moronic “strategy” turn out? Gaza was saved? Also y’all sent a powerful message to Democrats. They truly learned their lesson. Such brilliance. But what do I know, I must be fake because I don’t lack the brain power of a farm animal like you frauds do. You’ve all taught me so much. I cannot wait to sabotage the next election which probably won’t even happen because of our blind moronism which led to trump as fully intended. We TOTALLY give a rats ass about gazans, that’s why we let trump murder the fuck out of them. It makes us so morally pure. Totally logical and not stupid as fucking shit to anyone who is capable of thought whatsoever!
You were fine with trump as long as you got your genocide.
So the whole world wants to annhialate the US is your theory, interesting. OK, well have fun with that.
They do, hell most americans want the same