this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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The division on the left over Palestine has got to be the dumbest fucking shit I've ever seen. Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face.
I have probably one of the more controversial comments on this thread. I plan on voting for Biden, because harm reduction is the best I can realistically do in this federal election, and the other guy is very clearly worse. I encourage you to do the same just based on my own beliefs and opinions. I'm still openly critical of Biden because fuck sitting back and watching a genocide happen and saying "golly, at least he's not Trump". We can and should do better, and if team Biden doesn't like it, maybe they should stop supporting genocide.
Maybe I'm just not up to date on the memo, but where did the idea that criticism isn't allowed come from?
I can't think of any president that I haven't criticized. Obama pissed me off immediately forgetting about his promise to close Gitmo or stop warrantless surveillance.
I'm not seeing people saying not to criticize the administration.
What people are saying is holy fuck white supremacist Christian fascists are about to instill a monarch who will hurt many, many people if they can get away with it.
It's a pretty clear and understandable message, and its unprecedented nature over the last few centuries kind of does warrant the volume with which it is attempted to be conveyed to people who say things like "because I don't like what the administration is doing with issue x I might not vote or will vote 3rd party."
Not liking what the administration is saying and saying you don't like it is the very essence of the American experience. But throwing away your vote in this century's equivalent to the election in 1930s Germany is not just tone deaf but an active middle finger to every minority that's going to be persecuted under gold-plated Hitler, Palestinians included.
Personal experience on Lemmy and Mastodon. Even things as trivial as criticizing the Biden campaign's strategy for stuff like hiring high level HRC16 folks and taking their advice as anything more than a joke or their strategy of just telling people who are feeling economic strain that they're actually just confused because everything is great has earned me all kinds of ire and claims that I'm everything from a Russian troll to a Trump supporter. Really, it pains me to see the democrats sucking this hard; I see a lot of familiar themes from '16 developing and it's making me nervous, including how other left voters are giving me shit for having the gall to question the wisdom of the campaign.
If we're going to win, I think it's not going to be by repeating the HRC16 strat of hand waving all criticism with "But Trump! The election is too important!" It didn't work last time, and I don't think it will this time. Besides that, it's kind of disappointing to hear what effectively amounts to "I'd love to be critical of genocide, but the election is too important." I kinda get where they're coming from, but at this rate, there might not be anyone in Gaza left to save by the time November gets here. We'll just have to kick rocks and go "golly, hopefully the next genocide doesn't happen in an election year".
I think the issue is the people stating they won’t vote or the ones wanting to let Trump win to “just tear things down.” We don’t have near the numbers or popular will to tear things down and we didn’t have it last time Trump tore things apart. The damage he did is still being felt across the government and people just don’t understand how slowly change happens. It took the right 50 years and billions of dollars to get us here. It’s not going to change with one president or one political event.
I read that before, prolly from one of the gradbears or something, on how they didn't mind Trump winning and going full authoritarian, because that was a chance to "hit the reset button". Now, even with my best will I can read that as 'revolution + new constitution' but I cannot imagine how these people think that shit is going to go down in the USA today.
I'm genuinely curious, would you vote for Hitler as a form of harm reduction? Obviously the genocide he did was bad, but say he was running against someone else who was also planning on committing a genocide.
The Nazis put money into infrastructure development, education (granted in this context it was also indoctrination, but there was genuine education being done too), expansion of welfare; better access to healthcare, public works programs, public health policies (though again, muddied with ideas about "racial purity").
Imagine he was running against another pro-genocide antisemite, but who was against all the welfare/public spending mentioned above, and instead wanted to deregulate the economy, causing even more material harm than the Nazis.
Would you be telling people to go out and vote for Hitler as a form of harm reduction? Is there literally no line a person/party can cross that makes them not worthy of a vote; no line that makes the system illegitimate and participation in it/implicit endorsement problematic?
Look, what you're trying to to get at here is that by voting for one party, you're affirming support for their policies. Perhaps the best way to frame this is that this is a little like the trolley problem, in that I can choose to do nothing and let the trolley (the US political system, in this case) run over five people people (Trump stops any finger-wagging at Nettanyahu and probably encourages a similar attack on the West Bank, as well as starts rounding up and deporting anyone with any detectable melanin levels, as well as going all in on climate change on the side of CO2, as well as whatever the fuck else who knows), or I can become a participant and pull the lever to try to make the Trolley run over one person instead (Biden's half ass finger wagging at Nettanyahu). Is pulling the lever problematic? Yes. But I think not pulling the lever is objectively worse.
Agreed on the trolley scenario, but that's not exactly analogous. I'll try to make an analogy that extrapolates the principle of our current scenario to illustrate what I'm getting at.
Imagine there are 3 candidates, two major parties and a third party. Both candidates in the major parties want to nuke the planet to establish an American world government. Our guy wants to nuke 6 billion people, their guy wants to nuke 7 billion people. Polls show that the third party candidate has the same chance of winning as polls in the 2024 U.S election show. The third party candidate is against dropping nukes on the planet to establish a global America.
Do you vote for the one who wants to nuke 6 billion people as a form of harm reduction? Or is there some line that a candidate/party can cross that makes voting third party the best option, despite how unlikely they'll win?
I've voted third party before; it's a fairly meaningless gesture at best, letting the trolley run over five people while still holding the lever at worst. Imo, you're looking at the wrong thing here. In a FPTP election system, you're always going to end up with a two-party duopoly with voters constantly trying to play harm reduction. If you want to have a meaningful impact at the ballot box- to have our third party votes actually count for something, it requires addressing the voting system that creates these conditions. Ranked Choice Voting/ STV movements are growing in the US; I plan on joining the one in California, I suggest you do the same thing.
I understand your sentiment, but I'm curious if you'll actually commit to the principle you are espousing. Would you actually vote for a candidate that wants to bomb "only" 6 billion people over 7 billion, instead of "throwing away" your vote for someone who doesn't want to nuke the planet?
I came back to say that your assertion about a two party system never arriving at a "too extreme" position is 100% correct. That's why it needs to be done away with.
That's a hard thing to answer for me, because it turns into looping arguments about ethics vs game theory. In practical terms, I know that other voters will avoid choosing the third party candidate, so the obvious choice is then re-apply my selection filter to the one of the two likely candidates that kills fewer people. In pure ethical terms, the obvious choice is to vote for the candidate that wants to kill nobody and then spend the rest of my life standing on the side of a road in the nuclear wastes ranting about how other people are bastards. I've been on both sides. In the moment, I choose pragmatism.
But really, the best thing to do is to try and reform our election system. I actually just signed up with CARCV.org before I hopped on here. When I have more time, I'll look at what I need to do to volunteer instead of just signing a petition and joining a mailing list.
The balkanization of the left has been a thing since before the Balkans themselves.
Just because someone protests an active genocide doesn't mean they cannot also be upset about what else is wrong in the world.
Divisive cartoons like this, horse race politics, and the straw man argument of the single issue voter are all more dangerous than the youth finding their voice in political discussion.
There is no "division on the left" over Palestine.
There's just people who'd set America as well as global stability on fire to prove a "point" and there's people who wouldn't
Ftfy.
Your "fixing" just changed the meaning entirely to ignore the hard truth you don't care about. And you pretend you're being altruistic, just to be extra disgusting I guess
It's largely orchestrated. Fascists push it because it weakens the left. Leninists/Salinists/Maoists push it because they see it as accelerationist. Which to them is a good thing, because their ideology isn't an improvement over capitalism. They know they can only convince others to adopt it by making things worse, not better. Much the same as capitalism and mercantilism does/did.
Super well put.
The way I see it. Biden is really choosing to die on this hill. It is irresponsible for him to support Israel when the stakes are this high.
Why is he not taking this seriously?
He is. Support for Israel is policy, not politics. It's not Biden supporting Israel... it's the entire US political establishment that does.
You might just as well ask Biden to stop the US from being imperialist - no member of the US political establishment would ever do that. Period.
This is why you see liberals everywhere heeding the clarion call to pre-emptively start looking for people to blame when Biden hands over to the GOP (the "bad cop") come November.
No I agree. The establishment is fucked. And If Biden were actually serious about beating Trump (because the stakes are rightfully so high), then he'd Buck the establishment.
Neoliberals would rather have a Dictator Trump than a Progressive Policy. Which is hilarious when the "progressive policy " is just a sign that says "no genocide".
I'm sure if it wasn't Palestine they would have picked some other hill to die on
Seriously, Palestinian American here and I feel actually violated for them to be using my kin's corpses as fetish porn for their narrative.
I have family who are Nakba victims that I haven't been able to meet because they put everything into giving my grandfather the chance to escape, people who actually experienced the genocide first hand, and all I can see in these people wielding it as a cudgel to declare they won't vote and nobody else should either is the same white cynical "leftism" that made Nader and Stein become the perfect catastrophes for American democracy.
Here is the single Palestinian cause, Badna N3aesh! We want to live! We want to live, both in the homeland, and everywhere else we may go, and that means you have no right to use our dead to let the ones who would kill us here too into power.
Badna N3aesh!!!
Kinda hard for Palestinians living in Palestine to actually live when biden hands over billions of dollars in weapons for israel to bomb them. Why are you more mad at people opposed to genocide than the ones who full-throatedly support the bombing of Palestinians?
This is some Matrix level missing the point.
The point literally couldn't have come at you any more directly, and you still dodged around it and redirected, and doubled down on the pretense that somehow this person doesn't care about their own dead relatives, and you need to instruct them on what's important and what they need to understand and how to look at it, and why they should get on board with your politics, otherwise they don't care about their own dying and suffering people.
I wrote one sentence pointing out how biden's actions run directly counter to "we want to live" and then asked a question for clarification. You jumped in and twisted yourself into a pretzel to tell me how much I've missed the point without actually explaining how.
Sure. So it's not really my place to have this whole conversation, but I already did get involved, and I'm happy to give my input.
The point is that whatever's going on with Biden, Trump is objectively worse on every single metric, including but not limited to the safety of Arabs, Palestinians, and potential victims of the American military in general, at home and abroad.
Someone who cares about dead Palestinians could absolutely try to pressure Biden to stop sending weapons to the IDF, remove Netanyahu to the ICC, or whatever they want to do. Or they could point out that Biden is a monster for continuing the US's war criminal support for Israel, and not immediately denouncing Israel the instant they started blocking food aid or bombing hospitals. Sure. All that makes sense. If any of that is what you're doing, and it sounds like I'm trying to disagree with it, I am not. I actually originally came in this thread complaining about the OP cartoon, because I think most of the Palestine protestors are absolutely consistent and justified and the cartoon is grossly unfair as applied to them.
The very specific and very politically motivated construction from there to "that's why I can't support Biden, against Trump" or "that's why I'm not voting" or anything like that, is endangering Palestinians in Palestine, Palestinians in America, Hispanics in their home countries and in the US, Americans in the US, and many many other people, to an absolutely horrifying level.
This person is, if I am understanding them correctly, objecting very specifically to the second one. They're asking that people stop using the suffering of them and their family and friends to try to promote a particular political agenda which actually endangers them, increasing the chance of a genocide much much worse than what's happening right now in Gaza, while pretending that it's a Palestinian-friendly course of action and they're doing it because they care about Palestinians. They're pointing out that it's a ghoulish and dangerous thing to point to their own dead relatives and then try to use them to excuse a politics which threatens to make a lot more corpses, while pretending that it's on their behalf.
Is that a good explanation for how?
That's fair, but I think there's room for disagreement on how to pressure biden and if biden is actually even better for Palestinians at all. After all, biden has been the top supporter of israel for his entire career and is the top recipient of money from pro-israel donors by a huge margin:
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind=Q05&recipdetail=S
So far biden has given israel everything they've wanted or needed. There is the case where he withheld weapons (but not "defensive" weapons) because of Rafah, but by that point israel already has more than enough to level the entire area and biden is already back to moving things forward for future weapon shipments. Clearly biden doesn't feel pressured enough to truly change his ways and I don't know how guaranteeing your vote will add pressure. I'm not saying to vote for trump, I myself will be voting for biden, but I feel like we shouldn't telegraph guaranteed votes to biden and the democrats no matter what they do. That's just a recipe for them taking you for granted and letting them get away with whatever they want.
You have GOT to be joking.
This part, I actually agree with. Ralph Nader did a great interview where he was expressing this huge level of frustration with Democratic voters and said more or less, I get the reality, but there is a way to wield your vote in order to get things that you want. You get together a coalition, and you credibly communicate to the person in the election that they can only get all of your votes if they do X, Y, and Z. That puts pressure on them and it can absolutely change policy.
To him, he was saying that he thinks it's criminally silly to just say "well Biden's better than Trump so he can count on my vote." Like I say, objecting to that makes sense to me. By the same token I think it's silly to say "well Biden's not good enough so he can count on not getting my vote even if Trump is 10 times worse". Both of those courses of action are passing up an opportunity to actually influence policy. But stuff like the uncommitted votes in Michigan I thought were a great idea.
I mean that coalition building takes work, and it maybe won't succeed, it's this huge operation where throwing around comments on Lemmy is pretty easy. But it will actually help, if you do it.
@PhlubbaDubba
Fake account.
Zionism is Bidens ONLY reason for being.
Palestinians know this.
https://theconversation.com/biden-says-the-u-s-would-have-to-invent-an-israel-if-it-didnt-exist-why-210172
@Zoboomafoo
Moghafil, la tu7aawilha m3aee!
This. It's almost like how a prominent Lemmy dev seems to believe his "struggle" is the same as a former Haitian slave. You want to talk about offensive appropriation to the point of self parody?
The idea that these privileged cynics use the corpses of heroes as a pedestal to push their agenda is absolutely disgusting.
It's the same reason the chrisnats attached themselves to fetuses
Palestinian corpses can't demand accountability or advocate their own interests which might not align with yours
Is that why biden loves sending billions of dollars of weapons to israel to create more Palestinian corpses?
Edited: Fat fingered my reply.