I remember asking my mother in the days before the election if she really thought the Democratic party leadership was willing to sacrifice America just insulate Israel from consequences and she just couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea that Israel and Palestine was a big deal because it just didn’t show up in her news that much…
“I don’t think everybody’s as plugged into the news as You are ‘Faithful’ I don’t think that’s as big a deal as you seem to think it is.”.
That’s when I knew we were doomed.
She should have come out publicly against Israel’s behavior and said she was willing to rein them in. That was the minimum she should have done. Anybody telling her otherwise was willing to sacrifice America for Israel.
Israel was the litmus test. Can you call water wet? Is the sky blue? Is genocide wrong? Can we stop funding it?
Her failure to do this was a failure not a difference of opinion. Whoever the next candidate is is going to need to acknowledge the reality of the world and that might mean removing the Zionist lobby from the conversation entirely by force if necessary.
We didn’t avoid “that whole Israel thing”, because Harris and Trump were in agreement on that. Maybe if Harris had been against it, she wouldn’t have lost. But she chose to support a genocide, over keeping Trump out of office. It sounds to me like she should have had better priorities.
So, Israel was unavoidable, on that we can agree. Was the new doctrine for ICE unavoidable? Was the complete erosion of any sustem that upheld civilian rights unavoidable? Was the complete dismantling of USAide avoidable? Were the tariff wars unavoidable? Was all the unsafe food unavoidable?
I guess there was just nothing that could have been helped, they’re just the exact same thing, right? Otherwise your ideals, well, they’d be compromised, and surely nothing is more important than the way you interpret things as they are required to be. Reality is for losers, afterall. Let it be damned.
Uh, what? No. I don’t agree with that at all. It was so easily avoidable, that other candidates were already calling it out as a problem.
Was the new doctrine for ICE unavoidable?
Of course it was avoidable. But Biden decided to go ahead and increase funding to ICE as well. I didn’t see Harris criticize that, in fact, I seem to remember her being supportive of ICE.
Was the complete erosion of any sustem that upheld civilian rights unavoidable?
No, it wasn’t unavoidable. Biden and Obama did that just for funzies. I don’t remember her speaking out about that.
Was the complete dismantling of USAide avoidable? Were the tariff wars unavoidable? Was all the unsafe food unavoidable?
Nope, none of this was unavoidable. Maybe Harris should have run a serious campagin to try to keep these things from happening.
I guess there was just nothing that could have been helped, they’re just the exact same thing, right?
Wut? Who said they were the exact same thing? I never did. Again, Liberals keep telling me what I think, instead of talking about the points that I’ve actually made.
Otherwise your ideals, well, they’d be compromised…
Yeah, my rigid and unrealistic ideals like “bombing kids is bad”, and “rapists are bad”, and “genocide is bad”, and “torture is bad”. How awful of me to have those as a standard.
and surely nothing is more important than the way you interpret things as they are required to be. Reality is for losers, afterall. Let it be damned.
I’m acurately pointing out the things that the Democrats did, and why they lost to Trump. Of course, you made up arguments for me, put words into my mouth, and yelled at me for things that I didn’t say, but I’m the one that is acting like “Reality is for losers…”
Blame it all on Biden, great call, very pragmatic. You know who else blames the entirety of this situation on Biden in a staggeringly similar manner as you just did?
Also, it’s text, there was no yelling or anger. Your hyperbolia is showing.
I didn’t blame it all on Biden. I also blamed Harris and Obama, and if it wasn’t implied enough, I’m blaming the rest of the Democratic party, including their voters.
You know who else blames the entirety of this situation on Biden in a staggeringly similar manner as you just did?
Yeah, people who remember more than 6 months ago. People who were paying attention when Biden was stumbling around, fucking up the economy, sending people to torture prisons, and spending a lot of money on building out Trumps projects.
Libs can’t help constantly telling on themselves by trivializing genocide to a mere personal preference.
“Take this gun Timmy, now do you want to murder these 10 people or those 11 people?”
“But I don’t want to murder anyone.”
“Fine then. If you’re going to be a child about this, I’ll murder the 11 people myself.”
Suddenly makes it a lot more clear that Timmy is the reasonable and sane one when you don’t trivialize mass murder into dinner preferences. But then, that would require seeing Palestinians as human beings.
Seems to be unpopular but I respect those voting 3rd party.
I live in the UK, voted for the green party even though they are not going to win where I live. I know they won’t, but perhaps in time more people will as they start to see the number become less insignificant. Maybe eventually it will grow to a point they have a chance.
Then I look around where I live and realise no, this is one of the areas dumb enough to vote for reform.
You’re behaving as if Kamala would have fundamentally changed federal laws protecting free speech the way the Trump admin has. She wouldn’t have, nor would she have enacted Project 2025 in the way the Trump admin has.
Bottom line: not voting for Kamala was shooting yourself in the foot if you actually give a shit about protesting against Israel.
Your the one that brought up Harris and pretended that she wasn’t a horrible monster. I was just pointing out data that contradicts that. You can call it “whataboutism” if you like, but I find it telling that Democrats still refuse to acknowledge that their failings are why people like Trump keep getting elected.
Quick question - would Kamala have pushed Project 2025? Yes or no.
Ah, so when you bring up Harris, its relevent. But when I bring up Harris, it’s whataboutism. Got it.
That being said, thank you for acknowledging that it would have been easier to protest Israel under Harris. You’ve proven my point for me.
I never said any such thing. In fact, I seem to recall a bunch of people being arrested for protesting Israel while Biden was president, despite Project 2025 not being in effect. Isn’t it weird how Liberals keep forgetting these things? I wonder why that is…
In that case, would you rather have a candidate that does nothing but pay lip service to your cause, or a candidate that actively donates your resources to destroy it?
Tough choice, I’m sure.
I do not feel bad about facetiously trivialising an argument about death and bloodshed into one about dinner in order to highlight the ridiculousness of the logic used.
In that case, would you rather have a candidate that does nothing but pay lip service to your cause, or a candidate that actively donates your resources to destroy it?
Huh? Are we pretending that we live in a fantasy world where the Biden administration didn’t bypass congress to send Israel more weapons? Because here in reality, both candidates objectively fell into the second category.
I do not feel bad about facetiously trivialising an argument about death and bloodshed into one about dinner in order to highlight the ridiculousness of the logic used.
The logic only looks ridiculous if you trivialize the stakes. You can make any logic look “ridiculous” if you compare it to something completely different.
No, the logic looks ridiculous when you try to bOtH sIdEs the two parties. Newsflash, there is more going on in the world besides the Israel Palestine conflict. Do you think Harris would have ended USAid? What about the Iran war?
The funding cuts to USAid alone are estimated to have lead to ~5-10x more deaths than anything in Gaza. Where is your outrage about that? Stop your bullshit.
I don’t agree with this oversimplified, utilitarian framework you’re using. “Lesser Evilism” is a specific philosophical and political framework, and one that is very naive and unexamined.
If a party is willing to screw over Palestinians today, then who will they screw over tomorrow? Trans people? Immigrants? Will you apply the same “lesser evilist” logic as minority groups get dropped off, one-by-one? This is exactly how the ruling class divides and conquers, and so long as that’s the state of things, no one’s rights could ever be secure.
Standing up for the lives of Palestinians is not only about Palestinians, it is about solidarity. Solidarity is a strategic decision to establish that no one will be abandoned and sold out, that we will not abandon the little guy just for the sake of securing an election. It is only through a foundation of solidarity that we will be able to build a successful movement that’s worth fighting for. To abandon Palestine would also mean abandoning those who are trying to build such a movement, causing it to fracture and strengthening the ruling class.
You can blame me for the ruling class’s actions all you want. If the only means I have to stop something they’re doing is to fracture the working class and side with a genocidiare, then I simply don’t consider that an option that’s available to me, and from my perspective, I don’t have any means to stop it. Except by working towards a future where ordinary people can unite with solidarity and take power back.
Suppose I had a suitcase nuke, and I could stop Trump from cutting USAID by setting it off in the middle of DC. Suppose that, when it’s all said and done, I’d have saved more lives than I’d taken. If I say that setting off a nuclear weapon in a city full of innocent people is simply not on the table for me, that I refuse to even consider it, does that make me a bad person, a reprehensible monster? Am I responsible for all the people who died from Trump’s cuts, because I didn’t kill a city full of innocents to stop it? Surely not. But then, if I refuse to support the destruction of Gaza in an effort to stop the cuts, how is that any different?
Lesser Evilism is a moral framework and a political strategy, but it is not sound or defensible when it’s identified as such and examined. But it generally isn’t, and is instead presented as “common sense” or “just rational.” Really, it’s just a vacuous rhetorical device used to justify tribalism.
There’s a stark difference in your example and the reality from November 2022. In that world the only realistic choice was between voting for Harris or Trump as president, and given those two choices, there was an absolutely objectively better choice. That is unless you have the mindset of “just tear it all down”, in which case, you reek of hypocrisy. All the harm you think Harris would have done, Trump has done and so so much more.
All that being said, I sure hope to %insert_deity_here% that Harris doesn’t run again in 2028, or if she does, she gets destroyed in the primaries.
there was an absolutely objectively better choice.
That doesn’t matter. Like I said, I do not believe in Lesser Evilism. Lesser Evilism tells us to betray our allies if we see an advantage and I don’t believe that’s a viable long-term strategy.
That is unless you have the mindset of “just tear it all down”, in which case, you reek of hypocrisy
Neither part of that is accurate. There is nothing hypocritical in opposing the state and opposing the state doesn’t necessarily mean “just tear it all down.”
Policy is determined by the balance of power between classes. Who’s in charge is a secondary concern. When FDR implemented the New Deal, that could only get past the political establishment in Congress (and was only something he considered doing, as he was also from the political establishment) because the economic crisis of the Depression had weakened them, and there was a fear of collective action, even revolution. That is why the New Deal policies continued regardless of which party was in power.
Conditions shifted after things like the AFL/CIO purging communists, which weakened the power of organized labor. At that point, the ruling class was able to start destroying them through anti-union and neoliberal policies, because they couldn’t fight back. Although Reagan is the face of that, the shift began under Carter and would be upheld under Clinton. It was the material conditions and the relative strength and organization of the classes which determined both the bipartisan creation of the New Deal and the bipartisan destruction of it.
When The Black Panthers started giving free breakfasts to kids, the government did everything they could to stop it, destroying the food, spreading misinformation that it was poisoned, etc. But eventually they realized that as long as children were going hungry, it wasn’t going to be possible to convince or propagandize families to keep them away from free food. So the government instead stopped the Panthers by implementing its own free breakfast program. Decades later, with the Panthers no longer around, the government’s free breakfasts have disappeared. Once again, it’s not a question of who held office and what they wanted, but of the relative power and organization of the classes.
None of those examples required “tearing it all down,” although in some cases the threat of that existed. It would be naive to pin all one’s hopes on some great revolution, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be gained from strengthening ourselves and shifting the balance of power, while working towards a future where that threat is a little less inconceivable.
I am not against supporting cooperative elements within the state, but that is always secondary to class conflict. I’m not going to allow my positions to be defined along the lines of electoral politics, unless doing so is not toxic to the non-electoral approach. Therefore, it’s not just about who’s the lesser evil, but about whether endorsing someone is going to disrupt efforts at building solidarity.
Like asking a group with a vegan if they want to go to a steakhouse or a seafood restaurant and then blaming the vegan for not picking the one you wanted.
You’re going to break an arm jerking yourself off that hard.
I remember asking my mother in the days before the election if she really thought the Democratic party leadership was willing to sacrifice America just insulate Israel from consequences and she just couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea that Israel and Palestine was a big deal because it just didn’t show up in her news that much…
“I don’t think everybody’s as plugged into the news as You are ‘Faithful’ I don’t think that’s as big a deal as you seem to think it is.”.
That’s when I knew we were doomed.
She should have come out publicly against Israel’s behavior and said she was willing to rein them in. That was the minimum she should have done. Anybody telling her otherwise was willing to sacrifice America for Israel.
Israel was the litmus test. Can you call water wet? Is the sky blue? Is genocide wrong? Can we stop funding it?
Her failure to do this was a failure not a difference of opinion. Whoever the next candidate is is going to need to acknowledge the reality of the world and that might mean removing the Zionist lobby from the conversation entirely by force if necessary.
For sure, actual Hitler was a way better option to let your chips fall on. Glad we avoided that whole Israel thing that Kamala was gonna do.
Acknowledging how failure occurs is not rooting for the success of the enemy.
Kamala was extremely hard to sell. Harder somehow even than Hillary was. I campaigned for Julia Carson. Kamala was no Julia Carson.
How’d things go for Julia?
What was that about acknowledging how failure occurred?
We didn’t avoid “that whole Israel thing”, because Harris and Trump were in agreement on that. Maybe if Harris had been against it, she wouldn’t have lost. But she chose to support a genocide, over keeping Trump out of office. It sounds to me like she should have had better priorities.
So, Israel was unavoidable, on that we can agree. Was the new doctrine for ICE unavoidable? Was the complete erosion of any sustem that upheld civilian rights unavoidable? Was the complete dismantling of USAide avoidable? Were the tariff wars unavoidable? Was all the unsafe food unavoidable?
I guess there was just nothing that could have been helped, they’re just the exact same thing, right? Otherwise your ideals, well, they’d be compromised, and surely nothing is more important than the way you interpret things as they are required to be. Reality is for losers, afterall. Let it be damned.
Uh, what? No. I don’t agree with that at all. It was so easily avoidable, that other candidates were already calling it out as a problem.
Of course it was avoidable. But Biden decided to go ahead and increase funding to ICE as well. I didn’t see Harris criticize that, in fact, I seem to remember her being supportive of ICE.
No, it wasn’t unavoidable. Biden and Obama did that just for funzies. I don’t remember her speaking out about that.
Nope, none of this was unavoidable. Maybe Harris should have run a serious campagin to try to keep these things from happening.
Wut? Who said they were the exact same thing? I never did. Again, Liberals keep telling me what I think, instead of talking about the points that I’ve actually made.
Yeah, my rigid and unrealistic ideals like “bombing kids is bad”, and “rapists are bad”, and “genocide is bad”, and “torture is bad”. How awful of me to have those as a standard.
I’m acurately pointing out the things that the Democrats did, and why they lost to Trump. Of course, you made up arguments for me, put words into my mouth, and yelled at me for things that I didn’t say, but I’m the one that is acting like “Reality is for losers…”
Blame it all on Biden, great call, very pragmatic. You know who else blames the entirety of this situation on Biden in a staggeringly similar manner as you just did?
Also, it’s text, there was no yelling or anger. Your hyperbolia is showing.
I didn’t blame it all on Biden. I also blamed Harris and Obama, and if it wasn’t implied enough, I’m blaming the rest of the Democratic party, including their voters.
Yeah, people who remember more than 6 months ago. People who were paying attention when Biden was stumbling around, fucking up the economy, sending people to torture prisons, and spending a lot of money on building out Trumps projects.
Yup, and one election cycle was going to change all of that. Progress does tend to happen just all at once, like a miracle from god.
God damn, idealism is one hell of a drug.
You’re gonna break the world sucking off Wall St that hard.
Cool.
“Do you want to go to the pizza place or the burger restaurant, Timmy?”
“I don’t want either! I want macaroni and cheese!”
“Macaroni and cheese is not an option, Timmy, now pick from what’s available or I’m deciding for you.”
“No! I’m not picking!”
“Okay, we’re going to the pizza place then.”
(1 hour later) “This pizza sucks! It’s all the burger place’s fault for not appealing to me hard enough by serving macaroni and cheese.”
Libs can’t help constantly telling on themselves by trivializing genocide to a mere personal preference.
“Take this gun Timmy, now do you want to murder these 10 people or those 11 people?”
“But I don’t want to murder anyone.”
“Fine then. If you’re going to be a child about this, I’ll murder the 11 people myself.”
Suddenly makes it a lot more clear that Timmy is the reasonable and sane one when you don’t trivialize mass murder into dinner preferences. But then, that would require seeing Palestinians as human beings.
Seems to be unpopular but I respect those voting 3rd party.
I live in the UK, voted for the green party even though they are not going to win where I live. I know they won’t, but perhaps in time more people will as they start to see the number become less insignificant. Maybe eventually it will grow to a point they have a chance.
Then I look around where I live and realise no, this is one of the areas dumb enough to vote for reform.
ShitLibs having actual morals instead of just vibes challenge: impossible
You’re behaving as if Kamala would have fundamentally changed federal laws protecting free speech the way the Trump admin has. She wouldn’t have, nor would she have enacted Project 2025 in the way the Trump admin has.
Bottom line: not voting for Kamala was shooting yourself in the foot if you actually give a shit about protesting against Israel.
You mean the same Kamala that proudly stood behind Biden when he was arresting people for their speech?
Or the same Harris that gave up the easiest elections the Democrats have ever had to keep the genocide going?
Or the same Harris that that said Trump was being to easy on Iran?
Crazy, are whataboutisms all you have to offer?
Quick question - would Kamala have pushed Project 2025? Yes or no.
Edit: My next question will be 'Would she have attacked free speech the same way Trump has?" You might as well answer that too.
Your the one that brought up Harris and pretended that she wasn’t a horrible monster. I was just pointing out data that contradicts that. You can call it “whataboutism” if you like, but I find it telling that Democrats still refuse to acknowledge that their failings are why people like Trump keep getting elected.
No, of course not.
The post is about Harris you muppet.
That being said, thank you for acknowledging that it would have been easier to protest Israel under Harris. You’ve proven my point for me.
Ah, so when you bring up Harris, its relevent. But when I bring up Harris, it’s whataboutism. Got it.
I never said any such thing. In fact, I seem to recall a bunch of people being arrested for protesting Israel while Biden was president, despite Project 2025 not being in effect. Isn’t it weird how Liberals keep forgetting these things? I wonder why that is…
Oh, you’re talking about Palestine.
In that case, would you rather have a candidate that does nothing but pay lip service to your cause, or a candidate that actively donates your resources to destroy it?
Tough choice, I’m sure.
I do not feel bad about facetiously trivialising an argument about death and bloodshed into one about dinner in order to highlight the ridiculousness of the logic used.
Huh? Are we pretending that we live in a fantasy world where the Biden administration didn’t bypass congress to send Israel more weapons? Because here in reality, both candidates objectively fell into the second category.
The logic only looks ridiculous if you trivialize the stakes. You can make any logic look “ridiculous” if you compare it to something completely different.
No, the logic looks ridiculous when you try to bOtH sIdEs the two parties. Newsflash, there is more going on in the world besides the Israel Palestine conflict. Do you think Harris would have ended USAid? What about the Iran war?
The funding cuts to USAid alone are estimated to have lead to ~5-10x more deaths than anything in Gaza. Where is your outrage about that? Stop your bullshit.
I don’t agree with this oversimplified, utilitarian framework you’re using. “Lesser Evilism” is a specific philosophical and political framework, and one that is very naive and unexamined.
If a party is willing to screw over Palestinians today, then who will they screw over tomorrow? Trans people? Immigrants? Will you apply the same “lesser evilist” logic as minority groups get dropped off, one-by-one? This is exactly how the ruling class divides and conquers, and so long as that’s the state of things, no one’s rights could ever be secure.
Standing up for the lives of Palestinians is not only about Palestinians, it is about solidarity. Solidarity is a strategic decision to establish that no one will be abandoned and sold out, that we will not abandon the little guy just for the sake of securing an election. It is only through a foundation of solidarity that we will be able to build a successful movement that’s worth fighting for. To abandon Palestine would also mean abandoning those who are trying to build such a movement, causing it to fracture and strengthening the ruling class.
You can blame me for the ruling class’s actions all you want. If the only means I have to stop something they’re doing is to fracture the working class and side with a genocidiare, then I simply don’t consider that an option that’s available to me, and from my perspective, I don’t have any means to stop it. Except by working towards a future where ordinary people can unite with solidarity and take power back.
Suppose I had a suitcase nuke, and I could stop Trump from cutting USAID by setting it off in the middle of DC. Suppose that, when it’s all said and done, I’d have saved more lives than I’d taken. If I say that setting off a nuclear weapon in a city full of innocent people is simply not on the table for me, that I refuse to even consider it, does that make me a bad person, a reprehensible monster? Am I responsible for all the people who died from Trump’s cuts, because I didn’t kill a city full of innocents to stop it? Surely not. But then, if I refuse to support the destruction of Gaza in an effort to stop the cuts, how is that any different?
Lesser Evilism is a moral framework and a political strategy, but it is not sound or defensible when it’s identified as such and examined. But it generally isn’t, and is instead presented as “common sense” or “just rational.” Really, it’s just a vacuous rhetorical device used to justify tribalism.
There’s a stark difference in your example and the reality from November 2022. In that world the only realistic choice was between voting for Harris or Trump as president, and given those two choices, there was an absolutely objectively better choice. That is unless you have the mindset of “just tear it all down”, in which case, you reek of hypocrisy. All the harm you think Harris would have done, Trump has done and so so much more.
All that being said, I sure hope to %insert_deity_here% that Harris doesn’t run again in 2028, or if she does, she gets destroyed in the primaries.
That doesn’t matter. Like I said, I do not believe in Lesser Evilism. Lesser Evilism tells us to betray our allies if we see an advantage and I don’t believe that’s a viable long-term strategy.
Neither part of that is accurate. There is nothing hypocritical in opposing the state and opposing the state doesn’t necessarily mean “just tear it all down.”
Policy is determined by the balance of power between classes. Who’s in charge is a secondary concern. When FDR implemented the New Deal, that could only get past the political establishment in Congress (and was only something he considered doing, as he was also from the political establishment) because the economic crisis of the Depression had weakened them, and there was a fear of collective action, even revolution. That is why the New Deal policies continued regardless of which party was in power.
Conditions shifted after things like the AFL/CIO purging communists, which weakened the power of organized labor. At that point, the ruling class was able to start destroying them through anti-union and neoliberal policies, because they couldn’t fight back. Although Reagan is the face of that, the shift began under Carter and would be upheld under Clinton. It was the material conditions and the relative strength and organization of the classes which determined both the bipartisan creation of the New Deal and the bipartisan destruction of it.
When The Black Panthers started giving free breakfasts to kids, the government did everything they could to stop it, destroying the food, spreading misinformation that it was poisoned, etc. But eventually they realized that as long as children were going hungry, it wasn’t going to be possible to convince or propagandize families to keep them away from free food. So the government instead stopped the Panthers by implementing its own free breakfast program. Decades later, with the Panthers no longer around, the government’s free breakfasts have disappeared. Once again, it’s not a question of who held office and what they wanted, but of the relative power and organization of the classes.
None of those examples required “tearing it all down,” although in some cases the threat of that existed. It would be naive to pin all one’s hopes on some great revolution, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be gained from strengthening ourselves and shifting the balance of power, while working towards a future where that threat is a little less inconceivable.
I am not against supporting cooperative elements within the state, but that is always secondary to class conflict. I’m not going to allow my positions to be defined along the lines of electoral politics, unless doing so is not toxic to the non-electoral approach. Therefore, it’s not just about who’s the lesser evil, but about whether endorsing someone is going to disrupt efforts at building solidarity.
Like asking a group with a vegan if they want to go to a steakhouse or a seafood restaurant and then blaming the vegan for not picking the one you wanted.