Where is the outrage? Where have all the "humans" gone? Israel slaughtered over 300 innocent civilians in Gaza last night. Most of them women and children.
None of those with #Ukraine, #Canada, #Mexico and #EU flags on their profile raising their voice condemning this outrageous crime.
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The sheikh wandered around the city with a lamp
I'm tired of all the devils and the death, and seeking one human
They said it cannot be found, we have searched, As we said before
That which cannot be found I desire
Rumi
دی شیخ با چراغ همی گشت گرد شهر
کز دیو و دد ملولم و انسانم آرزوست
گفتند یافت می نشود جسته ایم ما گفت
آن که یافت می نشود آنم آرزوست
#poetry #Rumi #Gaza #Inhumanity #Death #politics #Israel #Genocide #WarCrime
@[email protected] @[email protected] @israel @iran
Why would US Arabs vote for Harris? They have nothing to lose. Both parties are unwavering in their pro-genocide foreign policy, what difference does it make to the relatives they lost? A person is most concerned with their immediate relations; their family, community and homeland. After so much death and destruction, personal loss and gaslighting by the media, why would they even give a shit? When you lose family, you lose everything.
It is strange you decide to criticise the powerless Arab voters instead of the Democrats who had all the power, money and influence to stop the genocide if they wanted to. But they didn't; they didn't care when Rafah was bombed and they don't care now, because they never cared about Palestinians. This would have happened even if the Dems had won. Punching down instead of punching up won't help; it simply makes you look like a selfish person who is only concerned with their issues. Criticise those in power, who had it coming because they had all the means to prevent this.
No, Israel-Palestine would likely be very different right now had Harris won. I don't think it would be where we want it to be, and people like you would probably be saying how Trump would have fucked it up so hard that there'd have been no choice but to ceasefire or some such dumb ass mental gymnastics, but it is pretty obvious to anyone even minimalist informed that Harris/Dem admin would have been a VERY different situation for US support to Netanyahu.
That said, it's a waste of time to punch down, like you said. A not insignificant number of Arab American voters made a really stupid and poorly thought out choice, but nevertheless, a larger number of the electorate at large made a choice actually expecting this to happen. They are largely to blame and Republicans in general, from voter to elected, should be held responsible.
'Vote blue no matter who' people like to say that it would have been different (with the implication that different would be better) but they very rarely say how.
The few times they do say how, it's generally the work of minutes to one documentation of Biden doing the exact same thing.
So.
How?
How would it have been different? And, because I'm emotionally drained from dealing with my cat dying, I'm going to specify that it actually has to be better, not just different.
We literally told her and the Dems what needed to happen in order to get our vote: commit to BDS. But they refused, and instead ran two very different campaign ads in SE Michigan and the rest of the country. That was our compromise and that was the Dem's choice, not ours.
Don't forget, voting for the lesser of 2 evils is still voting for evil.
Yeah. But when the lesser of two evils wins, there is less evil.
You know what doesn't happen when you abstain? Less evil.
The goal is and always should be less evil.
You genocide supporting scum deserve as much evil as possible to fall upon you.
Less evil for whom? The Arabs who lost family and friends to this war? Once you cross the threshold of genocide, does it even matter anymore? From an Arab's perspective, it's like asking what is worse, the Tasmanian genocide (which killed every full-blooded Tasmanian by 1876) or the Armenian genocide? What does it matter when both were literally the most evil you can get?
I don't fault American women/minorities for voting in their self interest. Abortion and queer rights was an issue for many people and they voted in for their rights. That's a fault of the state. But when you lose family, friends, neighbours and country to a genocide, what does it matter? Family is the most important, after food and water. Death of family is extremely traumatic. And then telling those grieving people to go vote for a butcher against their own raging conscience and blaming them for Democrat incompetence is just evil. You voted for your self interest. They for theirs.
Less evil for the most amount of people possible as stated.
Yes, it does matter, less genocide is better than more genocide.
If they voted for Donald Trump, which an absolute fuck ton did, then no they did not. The thing about this argument is that we just had a protest organizer kidnapped publicly and loudly by this admin. That guy has family. Let's say that the amount of deaths would be or are a 1:1 ratio in Gaza. That ratio is officially fucked because now we're attacking US residents. So like I've said as many times as I can say it: We are a social species, it is a requirement that we work together to prosper, vote like it. Do the best you can do. Vote for the best outcome for the most amount of people possible.
Genocide isn’t less evil. They are exactly the same
less evil is still evil
I'm going to go ahead and add to this, if you are willing cast aside progress in the name of perfection, you will never make it to either one.
If you're waiting for your dream candidate to come by, you're waiting a very long time. Your vote should be to minimize pain and suffering for the largest amount of people possible. You cannot in good conscience say that a vote for Trump is that, and when it's down to two people, you've just gotta do your best.
This species functions best from community, we are a social species and our success depends on how we treat each other. Even if you are the most selfish person on the planet, it's imperative that you vote for most people's best interest because you will gain the most from it.
Why do we have to keep telling you dipshits this insane logic doesn't work?
If the democratic party is willing to cast aside progress (being against genocide) in the name of perfect (funding and supporting Israels genocide), you'll never make it to the presidency.
Why is the responsibility on random voters, vs people who are actually in power and have the means to change policy with the knowledge that the policy is negatively harming their electoral chances? Why is the "electability" argument not applicable to stopping genocide as a reason to criticise democrats, versus, say, insisting we can't have healthcare because people love insurance companies too much as a defence of why Democrats don't support medicare for all?
Why do we justify or criticise some policies by appealing to their perceived/assumed popularity, whilst appealing to the responsibility of voters to simply accept whatever is insisted upon them in others?
Maybe if people like you engaged your fucking brain on questions like this, you might come up with some answers that, however uncomfortable they are for you right now, might make you stop defending genocide as a means to divert responsibility from those in power to those who politicians are meant to be appealing to in order to win an election.
Show me where I defended genocide. If you're going to come in here in bad faith and a shitty attitude, at minimum be correct.
What do you think you're doing when you deflect focus and blame from those committing genocide to instead redirect the focus on how random individuals opposed to genocide are the real problem?
Just like climate change denial has explicit (it doesn't exist) and implicit (it won't be that bad, we can solve it with "innovation", markets for carbon credits, we need to maintain fossil fuel production for "national security"), there are explicit (there is no genocide in Palestine) and implicit (Biden was working tirelessly for a ceasefire, Kamala was good actually, It's Hamas fault).
Telling people it's the fault of those who literally spent months telling democrats to stop funding genocide and that this was going to cost them electorally, and not the people actually implementing the policy, and insisting we need to accept genocide when it's "our team" doing it is functional defence and support of genocide for the purpose of something so absurd and asinine as refusing to hold people with actual power responsible for what they are doing.
It is, funnily enough, in line with the transferral of blame from European antisemites to Arab countries and Palestine to excuse genocide. We have to support Israel and it's war against Palestinians because of what Europeans did to Jewish people. Palestinians are unfortunate casualties we just have to accept, and opposing that makes you an anti-semite, or in this case, a "purity tester" who refuses to accept a little thing like genocide between friends during an election, so really it's your fault when bad things happen for opposing them.
I’ll be generous and say you’ve got about 300 million other Americans you need to convince of this… most simply don’t give a shit about Palestine or any other external conflicts. You’re raging at the wrong people.
If we could magically make the bad guys go away, we would. But the sensible population in America is very small and numbers are dwindling.
So we try to go with the best we’ve got, which didn’t happen this time around. I wish things were different.
this form of propaganda is a false framing of reality to encourge people to vote with the seemingly "less evil" option while ignoring it's consequences down the road and is a trap that will only present you with "less evil" options each and every time until the ultimate evil is reached anyways, like it has for the gazans.
no one believes that trump is any less evil about any democrat and only people who have swallowed this propaganda believe that any imperialist is good for this or any genocide.
Okay, so what do we do next?
collectivize, like sanders told us to the other day.
Ez peazy, should be done by next week.
Has there been progress in the US since way back in Reagan's time?!
Because at so many levels, from inequality and the collapse of social mobility to widespread civil society surveillance and support for Genocide abroad, the US has been constantly regressing for decades both under Democrats and Republicans.
I mean, the last actual American President passing measures that one could call "progress" was JFK. Even Obama was the President that ordered the highest number of drone murders whilst in office of all and decided that the way to save the economy after the 2008 Crash was to protect asset owners and large financial institutions - the rich, not the rest - resulting in the steep increase in social inequality and final collapse of social mobility in the US of the last decade, and which created the fertile ground for the growth of support for the likes of Trump.
From my viewpoint as an European, you're just defending a slower regression, which is understandable but it ain't "progress" (last chance at that was Bernie Sanders and his primary was very overtly torpedoed by the DNC), and it's also understandable that others with strong moral convictions and even personal reasons connected to America's continued descent into evil aren't supporting any evil in America, even the "lesser" one that slows down the regression a bit.
You would have been absolutelly right if this election was indeed progress vs regression, but it wasn't, it was one Genocide-endorsing candidate who chose to try to attract far-right votes by getting cozier with the likes of the Cheney family versus a Genocide-endorsing candidate who is openly a far-right populist - two forms of evil differing mainly in delivery style and how fast do they want to go rightward - you blaming people for chosing "none of the above" is pure tribalism.
There's been both progress and regression. To try to paint it that black and white doesn't work. Even if we do agree that it is a slower regression, that is still the first step to progress here. That would be the same thing as saying that slowing damage of climate change would be meaningless.
Unless we start murdering billionaires in the streets, this is what we have.
I'm sorry but in over 2 decades of observing US politics from outside as I saw the country go from what I admired as a kid in the 80s into a shit show, I've seen a ton of "mild when it could've been heavy" regression being celebrated as "good" and a lot of one step forward and two steps back, but never any actual real, sustained progress.
Sure, you can claim that, for example, Clinton's economic boom after he tore down the Glass-Steagal Act was "progress", as long as you ignore the other consequences of it, namely the 2008 Crash, and the Recession after it and rise in inequality and collapse of social mobility.
If you use the traditional technique of sleazy politicians of claiming successes as theirs and failures as somebody else's, they're all making progress, but if you look at the trend line on things like inequality it's been consistently getting worse, just slower at times.
And no, that's not all you have: you can become politically active and along with other similarly minded people start trying to take back the Democrat Party at the local level - start supporting non-AIPAC bough candidates in the next Congressional and Senatorial Primaries, do leafleting campaigns reminding everybody of the evil-doing of many of the sitting Democrat Congressmen and Senators (their voting record is open and them receiving money from AIPAC is known for many). At a national level it's hard for non-billionaire individuals to move public opinion but at local level it's a lot easier.
After all, most polls seem to show that the actual Democrat voter mainly have good values, so it seems to me that it's the Democrat Political Leadership who are misaligned with the principles of the Democrat Party voters, no doubt because they can run their campaigns on "vote lesser evil" and there will be an over-abundance of people spreading the message that "We must vote for so that the more evil candidate does not win, there is no other option" all the while the evil Democrat candidate won't move in the slightest to not be evil.
Although I agree with just about all of this, were talking about what happened this election. Local race influence is at minimum a decade out, if we're still even able to vote when those times come. the right has been actively kneecapping people's ability to vote for a long time. My argument is that it is not perfect, no where near it, but far easier to bounce back from than far right total control. That's the argument, and it's an easy one.
Drone murders was a right wing lie. Obama killed fewer than any modern President except Carter.
Drones were not yet available in mass production during Bush Jr so Bush killed hundreds of thousands with regular bombs. Obama killed only hundreds of civilians. So to twist Obama's record into something bad, right wing media talked endlessly about drones, while completely ignoring the drastically lower number of deaths. It would be like calling Bush Sr the Stealth bomber killer because Bush Sr was the first to really use Stealth fighters in the first Gulf War.
Trump killed more in his first year with drones than Obama did in 8 years.
https://airwars.org/research/civilian-deaths-by-us-president-in-iraq-and-syria/
But as Joseph Goebels proved, if you repeat a lie long enough people will believe the lie.
Your link is for something else altogether than the campaign of murder by predator drone that Obama conducted in Pakistan, which if remember it correctly included blowing up a whole wedding to get to 1 man.
Frankly I don't care if he was the worst, the 2nd worst or the 3rd worst: the problem is that he still signed the orders for quite a lot of outright murders (no due process involved) and since I'm not a member of his political tribe and thus don't have a special moral discount for the chiefs of the tribe, his campaign of murder by drone puts him in the "Evil" category right alongside the rest.
Then there is the whole part of how he chose to save the Finance Industry after the Crash (which, me being in the Industry in London at the time, observed with quite a lot of attention).
But hey, cheers for quoting Goebels to defend a guy who ordered a campaign of murders in Pakistan: it's always pretty special when an American Neoliberal quotes Nazis to the rest of us to defend their own tribe's murdering leaders.
Yes, but there's less of it, which is an absolutely not debatable good thing comparatively.
whether there's less or more of it matters significantly less than whether it's let inside a cracked door where it WILL metastasize, as evidenced by this genocide and a multitude of others.
No. You're saying right now that you'd take stage 4 cancer over stage 1 because of the possibility of stage one getting to stage four?
No.
and you're saying stage 1 is an okay lesser evil.
No, they're saying stage 1 can be fought and overcome at a far less deleterious price. Keep in mind, all of the voices that are ardently pro-Palestine caucus with democrats. If you are running from a fire, you don't go into the room without any windows whatsoever because you're pissed that the other room only has small windows.
and the democrats didn't let a single one speak during the last presidential election.
How many did the Republicans have to even ignore? Look, no one, literally no one reasonable that I've seen, is saying the Democratic party is the goal. It's shit. Absolutely shit. But it has a workable path forward and members of varying degrees of alignment with not-shit. Republicans have never improved society in living memory by virtually every objective metric and provide no path to anything remotely resembling good.
Jesus Christ thank you.
I sincerely doubt it.