The silence from Muslim leaders on the president’s 2024 reelection bid is speaking volumes as Biden continues to back Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza.
Trump is even worse than Biden on Gaza. I get trying to push Biden to do better, but let’s all keep the truth in mind. The actual truth, not the click bait bullshit horse race covered by the media.
Electoral pressure is literally the only lever we have to push Biden to do better. There’s no other way. Biden’s team is making a bet that we aren’t serious and that they can just use Trump to hold us hostage in the party.
So! No ceasefire, no votes. If this war is still going on by November, and Netanyahu has been saying it will, I will not vote for Biden.
It’s so easy to earn our votes! Why is Biden sabotaging his own campaign?
Electoral pressure is literally the only lever we have to push Biden to do better. There’s no other way.
This is correct, barring revolution.
Biden’s team is making a bet that we aren’t serious and that they can just use Trump to hold us hostage in the party.
You are incorrect. Biden’s team, under the direction of the Democrat party, have taken away your lever because they don’t want to win. The Democrats have said this, publicly. They said back in 2016 that they would rather lose to Trump than win with Bernie. The Democrat party is happy to lose, always.
To say that they don’t want to win is to imply a secret conspiracy to lose, but that’s not what we see. With Hillary, they didn’t conspire to make Hillary lose. They really did want her to win! They didn’t want Bernie to win because he wasn’t a Democrat. Winning with Bernie would have fundamentally changed their shitty party, they didn’t want that. That’s just lose/lose for them.
If this analogy applies, if they would rather lose the election than stop doing genocide, then death to America. I won’t give a shit about who wins, hopefully whoever wins destroys this shithole.
To say that they don’t want to win is to imply a secret conspiracy to lose, but that’s not what we see
It’s EXACTLY what we see. 40 years of campaigning on Roe v Wade as law, zero moves to make it happen. Spending their own fundraising on Republican opponents. Espousing positions that people want but never actually following through. Compromising before negotiating. Democrats make their money from Wall St, just like Republicans do, so they have to lie about wanting to win for progressives to vote for them, but they don’t actually want to win because then they’ll be exposed. When they have a majority, it’s always a small majority and there’s always one to three Democrats that adopt the “spoiler” role, either switching sides, going independent, pretending to be a Blue Dog, or lying about the will of their own constituents being opposed to Democrat positions.
With Hillary, they didn’t conspire to make Hillary lose.
They conspired to lose the election. Not to make Hillary lose, but to choose the person who polled terribly, to choose the positions that wouldn’t mobilize the voters, etc.
They didn’t want Bernie to win because he wasn’t a Democrat
No True Scotsman fallacy coupled with a completely ahistorical view. Bernie has been a major part of the party for a very long time. The man is an imperialist through and through. He’s very useful to them as a Democrat, specifically, he’s useful to attract progressive voters and they can always throw an election by the way they manage him. Very few people in the party are like that. Hillary is like that for them too, though less progressive and more violent. But all they have to do is treat Hillary badly and alienate a huge amount of voters.
Winning with Bernie would have fundamentally changed their shitty party
No it wouldn’t have. Because general voters don’t elect party leadership, and the president doesn’t suddenly become the head of the party. The party would have been fine ideologically. Their problem was that Bernie would hurt their donors.
If this analogy applies, if they would rather lose the election than stop doing genocide, then death to America. I won’t give a shit about who wins, hopefully whoever wins destroys this shithole.
They would rather lose than stop doing the genocide. The country is built on genocide - non-stop genocide. Just go look up how many people the USA killed in each military action after WW2. Then go look at how many indigenous people they killed here. Then try to find the numbers for how many slaves they killed. Just for comparison, the very tiny island of Haiti was replacing around 50,000 slaves (because they were being worked to death) annually. During the Haitian revolt, hundreds were gassed by the French in the bottom of slave ships. And that’s just the KILLING. Then you’ve got the erasure of language, child separation policies, which you know about now but literally follow an unbroken line all the back to before the founding of the country, because separating kids from their parents is how you kill an entire social culture, forced sterilization of 1/3 of Puerto Rico and of indigenous and Black people was happening through the 1970s. Both parties are aware. They participated. They think it’s fine. They think it’s correct. They fucking paid the slave owners for property losses but refuse to pay reparations to those enslaved or their descendants.
The USA is a genocidal settler colony that asserted its own leadership, live a cancer that broke free from its host and now lives independently. All the politicians are engaged, fully or partially, in ongoing centuries of genocide.
No True Scotsman fallacy coupled with a completely a historical view. Bernie has been a major part of the party for a very long time. The man is an imperialist through and through. He’s very useful to them as a Democrat, specifically, he’s useful to attract progressive voters and they can always throw an election by the way they manage him. Very few people in the party are like that. Hillary is like that for them too, though less progressive and more violent. But all they have to do is treat Hillary badly and alienate a huge amount of voters.
This is like accusing an Welshman of being a Scotsman. He literally isn’t a Democrat. That’s his whole brand and his function to the party.
He is a major part of the party and certainly a useful idiot, but because he literally isn’t a Democrat isn’t allowed to be an important part of the party. His job is to be a sheepdog and shepherd us back into the polls for Democrats, he isn’t supposed to actually lead the party.
Also… are you implying they treated Hillary badly and caused her to lose on purpose? That’s a pretty wild accusation lol
No it wouldn’t have. Because general voters don’t elect party leadership, and the president doesn’t suddenly become the head of the party. The party would have been fine ideologically. Their problem was that Bernie would hurt their donors.
That’s a contradiction. If the party was fine ideologically then Bernie couldn’t hurt donors because that runs counter to their ideology.
Bernie would certainly hurt their donors, and that itself would fundamentally change the party because it would change who the financial backers of the party are - but you’re also ignoring how Trump very clearly changed the Republican party (yes, I know Republicans were always fascists, but they were cryptofascists before they stopped hiding behind dogwhistles). The very demographic base of the party changed because of who the president was, and now those “”“respectable”“” Republicans that Democrats love so much are on the outside of the party’s base. Bernie, if he had been allowed to win, would have changed the voter base and the financial base. They’d rather lose than have that.
This is all a ridiculous hypothetical, of course, because Democrats would rather lose than let Bernie win. But that’s it! They didn’t want Hillary to lose, they really wanted her to win - but they wanted her to win with her unpopular platform that caused them to lose. Her platform wasn’t intended to lose, though, and they didn’t give her an unpopular platform to make her lose. You’re really putting the cart before the horse here.
They would rather lose than stop doing the genocide.
It certainly looks that way, but that doesn’t mean they want to lose for its own sake. I’m not sure what you’re even arguing here.
It sounds like you’re saying that Biden supports the Zionist’s genocide literally because he wants to lose. As if this is a wedge issue that Democrats inflicted on themselves intentionally because they don’t want to be in power anymore.
It sounds like you’re saying that Biden supports the Zionist’s genocide literally because he wants to lose. As if this is a wedge issue that Democrats inflicted on themselves intentionally because they don’t want to be in power anymore.
No no, I’m saying the genocide is more important than winning. And if he has to lose in order for the genocide to continue under Trump, then they want to lose.
I see what you’re saying now, but I think they want to win and also continue supporting genocide at the same time. They’re actually ideologues that really believe they can have their cake and eat it too. They don’t actually want to lose and will be very surprised when it happens.
In order for them to actually be planning to lose it would require a lot of people to secretly agree to lose. I don’t think that’s happening. I think those people are delusionally confident and actually really believe they’re going to win. Maybe I’m underestimating their intelligence lol
Nah, you’re too credulous. The parties collaborate. Winning and losing is just part of the game. The small people care. The leaders golf together, vacation together, etc. They collaborate in the management of empire. No one actually cares who wins and loses. If they cared, they would behave differently.
Just on Israel-Palestine alone, Trump is the person that recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city. If that isn’t informative about his attitude about the situation…
Don’t know why you have downvotes, this is sound logic, trump will embolden Israel even more while fucking up a lot of other important stuff e.g. Ukraine
While I have serious issues with Biden on Israel, he really has no ability to force a ceasefire. (Short of sending US troops in to enforce it, and that would be a terrible idea.).
Biden could pull all US support for Israel, but that would create a power vacuum that China or (more likely) Russia would gladly fill. It still wouldn’t end the genocide, but it would put a wedge between Iran and the Palestinians. (Iran is their only powerful ally.)
Biden’s rhetoric needs to change, and we need Israel to feel some real heat for their actions, but the US doesn’t have Israel on a leash.
Anyone who starts a sentence with “you people” has likely got some morality issues of their own.
Foreign policy has to account for all the consequences of any decision, including counter moves. As a “friend of Israel” the US has some influence (less and less it would seem). From the outside we would have none whatsoever.
While I have serious issues with Biden on Israel, he really has no ability to force a ceasefire. (Short of sending US troops in to enforce it, and that would be a terrible idea.).
Did you forget about the UN Security Council votes? The ones the US ruined?
Resolutions against further settlement were completely ignored. Ultimately, UN resolutions rely on a willingness to use military force if necessary. There is no interest in that, and there shouldn’t be. That would certainly spread the conflict.
There actually was a successful vote on humanitarian aid, and that aid is being largely blocked by Israel.
It seems like the problem is with UN security council resolutions not being enforced, so why make it look like America is the issue? Why not give it the best chance? Hell If you cared about the well being of your fellow human beings (controversial I know) wouldn’t you be approving resolutions and then fighting to get them implemented? If they ignore it you can fucking sanction them. Use it to justify stopping arms sales and aid.
America cannot escape their responsibility for this, IMO. If they’d voted for a cease fire and Israel had ignored it, it would be Israel’s fault. The way it stands America shares the blame, whether they like it or not.
As I mentioned, the best chance for the US to influence Israel is for it to not take an adversarial role. It’s like negotiating with a hostage taker. (I hate oversimplified analogies in foreign policy, but this one works really well). A hostage negotiator tries to sympathize with the hostage taker because it’s the best way to get the hostages out safely. America has tried to thread the needle between putting pressure on Israel and remaining supportive. It hasn’t had much success, but it’s the best course open to us.
I am not of the opinion that moral considerations don’t belong in foreign policy, but moral judgements like assigning “blame” can be antithetical to achieving moral ends. The second you label a foreign government as “genocidal” you lose all ability to influence them with anything but military force.
I actually agree with you that America gets a lot of the blame for what is happening but, most of the fault comes from things before October 7. I also fault Biden for a lot of that, and I think he has been far too over the top in supporting Israel publicly. What I think they are getting bad press for is the broad strategy of trying to restrain Israel while maintaining the relationship.
Trump is worse than Biden on anything and everything. But if any president can get away with supporting a genocide campaign, is this not the way they get away with it? By simply claiming it will ruin their campaign efforts?
It’s sad ppl only read your first sentence and then are fully satisfied with whatever shit you throw on, as long as you don’t specifically say ‘Biden is really bad’
A president has already gotten away with it. Trying to selectively punish Biden now is actually a bit of hypocrisy. We should have done it in the first place. But we largely got in that position because of people who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Clinton, etc.
Biden’s moves are optically bad. But make a lot of sense as far as strategy goes. Traditionally. You have a much more powerful position to bargain as an ally than as an enemy. But that does not stop people like yourself from making hyperbolic claims.
Don’t get me wrong. Eileen, libertarian and communist. I have no real investment in Biden. I’m simply intelligent enough to know that he or Trump are going to win. And that he is by far the better choice. Which you yourself said. You just want to make some example of him despite your own face etc.
Unfortunately, the Democrats keep going back to the well of “what are you going to do, vote for the other guy?” Their success on this has been hit or miss the last few cycles. In fairness, it’s been a viable strategy in the past, if Democrats can get those few persuadable voters in the middle of the political spectrum to vote Democratic and not Republican, that’s a net win for the Democratic candidate. But, that begs the question of “are there enough persuadable voters left to offset losses when parts of your base stay home?” With Biden’s continued support for Israel’s actions, it seems that their political calculus says, “yes”.
However, we’ve seen this go both ways in the last few cycles. Clinton deployed the tactic in 2016 and commenters were out in force to brow-beat any of the deplorables who offered anything less than a full-thoated support of her turn. It got her the popular vote, but that has never mattered, she lost the election. The “vote blue no matter who” force was on full display again in 2020 and managed to eek out a win. And here you are again, ramping up for 2024. It’s going to be interesting to see how it works out this time.
Biden in 2020 had the advantage of being somewhat unknown. Everyone knew him as Obama’s Vice President and that provided him some of Obama’s popularity. This time around, he’s much more of a known quantity and he’s going to be running on his own record. Brow-beating people with “anyone but Trump” seems less likely to work when voters may be looking at specific policies and actions which they find at odds with their beliefs. When Biden was more of an unknown, it was easy for voters to map their own views onto him. We see this with polls which include “generic Democrat/Republican” as an option. People map their own views onto the “generic” view and so are more supportive. When a candidate becomes a known quantity, support can drop off, as the voters know which areas they agree and disagree with a particular politician. In the same way, Biden’s policies are now more understood by the voters and people may be less inclined to support him based on those policies.
Personally, I’m doubtful this sort of brow-beating is going to work this cycle. Biden’s popularity isn’t fantastic and he’s too well known for people to map their views onto him. Moreover, responding to people being upset with his actions with a brow-beating seems like a poor response to peoples’ legitimate issues. It seems more likely to convince them to disengage or push back even harder. Sure, what are they going to do, vote for the other guy? No, probably not, but they may also not show up on election day. And with the closely divided state of the US electorate, that might just be enough to swing things the other way.
Since when is Centrist defined as “I will shutdown the border as soon as you sign that bill”, “More kids in cages than the last guy”, “No prosecutions for leaders who incite a violent coup”, “More weapons for genocide”, “Let’s destroy the economy of our allies”, “We must keep the torture center at Guantanamo open”, “Who’s Epstein?”, “No I won’t pardon Peltier”, “No I won’t commute sentence of political prisoners”, “Yes, more black people in jail”, “Yes, it’s OK for prisoners to produce $11Bn in goods for private companies through slave labor”, “I swear we’ll do something about women’s health but it won’t be part of our political platform for the election”.
All of the evidence says we have the same two groups of white supremacist leaders we have always had: the plantation owners who bought the slaves, and the financiers who sold the slaves. You want to claim that the financiers are “centrist” in that formulation because they don’t personally whip people?
Every time someone posts an article about how it’s a bad thing that Biden is actively contributing to a genocide, the top comment is Trump whataboutism.
Yes, Trump is much worse, both on Israel and in general, but that’s not the fucking point!
Biden ain’t doing shit. He’s gonna go to Michigan and lie, then he’s going to maintain the same policies the US has for decades. It’s silly to think otherwise. And so it goes.
When it comes to American politics and actually affecting change, I think the energy is best invested in supporting progressive candidates from the bottom (local) up (national). Go to the primaries and vote for any candidate you can that is closer to your views if there are any. But when the time comes to vote for Biden, Trump, or abstain, anything other than voting for Biden is a vote for Trump, who is far worse in every conceivable way.
It’s funny how that and the fact that the Democratic party has already, against it’s own rules, removed all candidates other than Biden from the ballots in 10% of the States never gets brought up.
Instead we get a bunch of people posting in an attempt to shame people into voting for someone who supports genocide because ‘what else are you going to do’
I wish the Democratic party acted like Trump was the existential threat we all recognize him to be.
I definitely feel like so many actual democrats are starting to show similar signs as MAGAts did. It’s been there to an extent, but holy shit is it getting bad. Now it’s either love him or you’re a borderline terrible person.
That might be true, but in this timeline, both of them have been president, and only one has committed genocide. If Biden wants to make the case that a FORMER president who HASN’T committed genocide would be worse, then he needs to do a little better than committing genocide himself.
Um, what? How are you entirely unaware of the Trump administration’s support of Saudi Arabia commiting genocide in Yemen while Saudi officials dumped loads of cash at Trump resorts?
On foreign policy the US remains a genocidal bully with questionable morals and alliances. But domestically the Democrats present a veneer of somewhat moral, inclusive values. So with the presented choice I would recommend to go with the seemingly moral guy and try to hold him accountable, rather than vote for the fascist maniac that acts the same domestically and foreign.
Just hope you get locally active to organize a stronger left for the future.
The Canadian Conservative party is the one that usually runs on “imagine/look at how bad the other guy would be” as a party platform. It’s a bad look and a sign that you have nothing better. It’s politicking for the sake of politicking.
Trump is even worse than Biden on Gaza. I get trying to push Biden to do better, but let’s all keep the truth in mind. The actual truth, not the click bait bullshit horse race covered by the media.
Electoral pressure is literally the only lever we have to push Biden to do better. There’s no other way. Biden’s team is making a bet that we aren’t serious and that they can just use Trump to hold us hostage in the party.
So! No ceasefire, no votes. If this war is still going on by November, and Netanyahu has been saying it will, I will not vote for Biden.
It’s so easy to earn our votes! Why is Biden sabotaging his own campaign?
This is correct, barring revolution.
You are incorrect. Biden’s team, under the direction of the Democrat party, have taken away your lever because they don’t want to win. The Democrats have said this, publicly. They said back in 2016 that they would rather lose to Trump than win with Bernie. The Democrat party is happy to lose, always.
To say that they don’t want to win is to imply a secret conspiracy to lose, but that’s not what we see. With Hillary, they didn’t conspire to make Hillary lose. They really did want her to win! They didn’t want Bernie to win because he wasn’t a Democrat. Winning with Bernie would have fundamentally changed their shitty party, they didn’t want that. That’s just lose/lose for them.
If this analogy applies, if they would rather lose the election than stop doing genocide, then death to America. I won’t give a shit about who wins, hopefully whoever wins destroys this shithole.
It’s EXACTLY what we see. 40 years of campaigning on Roe v Wade as law, zero moves to make it happen. Spending their own fundraising on Republican opponents. Espousing positions that people want but never actually following through. Compromising before negotiating. Democrats make their money from Wall St, just like Republicans do, so they have to lie about wanting to win for progressives to vote for them, but they don’t actually want to win because then they’ll be exposed. When they have a majority, it’s always a small majority and there’s always one to three Democrats that adopt the “spoiler” role, either switching sides, going independent, pretending to be a Blue Dog, or lying about the will of their own constituents being opposed to Democrat positions.
They conspired to lose the election. Not to make Hillary lose, but to choose the person who polled terribly, to choose the positions that wouldn’t mobilize the voters, etc.
No True Scotsman fallacy coupled with a completely ahistorical view. Bernie has been a major part of the party for a very long time. The man is an imperialist through and through. He’s very useful to them as a Democrat, specifically, he’s useful to attract progressive voters and they can always throw an election by the way they manage him. Very few people in the party are like that. Hillary is like that for them too, though less progressive and more violent. But all they have to do is treat Hillary badly and alienate a huge amount of voters.
No it wouldn’t have. Because general voters don’t elect party leadership, and the president doesn’t suddenly become the head of the party. The party would have been fine ideologically. Their problem was that Bernie would hurt their donors.
They would rather lose than stop doing the genocide. The country is built on genocide - non-stop genocide. Just go look up how many people the USA killed in each military action after WW2. Then go look at how many indigenous people they killed here. Then try to find the numbers for how many slaves they killed. Just for comparison, the very tiny island of Haiti was replacing around 50,000 slaves (because they were being worked to death) annually. During the Haitian revolt, hundreds were gassed by the French in the bottom of slave ships. And that’s just the KILLING. Then you’ve got the erasure of language, child separation policies, which you know about now but literally follow an unbroken line all the back to before the founding of the country, because separating kids from their parents is how you kill an entire social culture, forced sterilization of 1/3 of Puerto Rico and of indigenous and Black people was happening through the 1970s. Both parties are aware. They participated. They think it’s fine. They think it’s correct. They fucking paid the slave owners for property losses but refuse to pay reparations to those enslaved or their descendants.
The USA is a genocidal settler colony that asserted its own leadership, live a cancer that broke free from its host and now lives independently. All the politicians are engaged, fully or partially, in ongoing centuries of genocide.
This is like accusing an Welshman of being a Scotsman. He literally isn’t a Democrat. That’s his whole brand and his function to the party.
He is a major part of the party and certainly a useful idiot, but because he literally isn’t a Democrat isn’t allowed to be an important part of the party. His job is to be a sheepdog and shepherd us back into the polls for Democrats, he isn’t supposed to actually lead the party.
Also… are you implying they treated Hillary badly and caused her to lose on purpose? That’s a pretty wild accusation lol
That’s a contradiction. If the party was fine ideologically then Bernie couldn’t hurt donors because that runs counter to their ideology.
Bernie would certainly hurt their donors, and that itself would fundamentally change the party because it would change who the financial backers of the party are - but you’re also ignoring how Trump very clearly changed the Republican party (yes, I know Republicans were always fascists, but they were cryptofascists before they stopped hiding behind dogwhistles). The very demographic base of the party changed because of who the president was, and now those “”“respectable”“” Republicans that Democrats love so much are on the outside of the party’s base. Bernie, if he had been allowed to win, would have changed the voter base and the financial base. They’d rather lose than have that.
This is all a ridiculous hypothetical, of course, because Democrats would rather lose than let Bernie win. But that’s it! They didn’t want Hillary to lose, they really wanted her to win - but they wanted her to win with her unpopular platform that caused them to lose. Her platform wasn’t intended to lose, though, and they didn’t give her an unpopular platform to make her lose. You’re really putting the cart before the horse here.
It certainly looks that way, but that doesn’t mean they want to lose for its own sake. I’m not sure what you’re even arguing here.
It sounds like you’re saying that Biden supports the Zionist’s genocide literally because he wants to lose. As if this is a wedge issue that Democrats inflicted on themselves intentionally because they don’t want to be in power anymore.
No no, I’m saying the genocide is more important than winning. And if he has to lose in order for the genocide to continue under Trump, then they want to lose.
I see what you’re saying now, but I think they want to win and also continue supporting genocide at the same time. They’re actually ideologues that really believe they can have their cake and eat it too. They don’t actually want to lose and will be very surprised when it happens.
In order for them to actually be planning to lose it would require a lot of people to secretly agree to lose. I don’t think that’s happening. I think those people are delusionally confident and actually really believe they’re going to win. Maybe I’m underestimating their intelligence lol
Nah, you’re too credulous. The parties collaborate. Winning and losing is just part of the game. The small people care. The leaders golf together, vacation together, etc. They collaborate in the management of empire. No one actually cares who wins and loses. If they cared, they would behave differently.
The trouble you guys face is Trump is worse.
Just on Israel-Palestine alone, Trump is the person that recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city. If that isn’t informative about his attitude about the situation…
Yeah, and that’s Biden’s fault, not the voters. He is letting an unqualified candidate beat him because he won’t stop funding the war on Gaza.
If the choices are genocide lite and genocide deluxe, the only answer is for America to be defeated. MLs call it revolutionary defeatism.
Don’t know why you have downvotes, this is sound logic, trump will embolden Israel even more while fucking up a lot of other important stuff e.g. Ukraine
While I have serious issues with Biden on Israel, he really has no ability to force a ceasefire. (Short of sending US troops in to enforce it, and that would be a terrible idea.).
Biden could pull all US support for Israel, but that would create a power vacuum that China or (more likely) Russia would gladly fill. It still wouldn’t end the genocide, but it would put a wedge between Iran and the Palestinians. (Iran is their only powerful ally.)
Biden’s rhetoric needs to change, and we need Israel to feel some real heat for their actions, but the US doesn’t have Israel on a leash.
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Anyone who starts a sentence with “you people” has likely got some morality issues of their own.
Foreign policy has to account for all the consequences of any decision, including counter moves. As a “friend of Israel” the US has some influence (less and less it would seem). From the outside we would have none whatsoever.
Did you forget about the UN Security Council votes? The ones the US ruined?
No, that is one of the serious issues, but I also know that UN security council votes would make no difference whatsoever.
How do you know that? It’s probably the best chance we have, surely?
Resolutions against further settlement were completely ignored. Ultimately, UN resolutions rely on a willingness to use military force if necessary. There is no interest in that, and there shouldn’t be. That would certainly spread the conflict.
There actually was a successful vote on humanitarian aid, and that aid is being largely blocked by Israel.
It seems like the problem is with UN security council resolutions not being enforced, so why make it look like America is the issue? Why not give it the best chance? Hell If you cared about the well being of your fellow human beings (controversial I know) wouldn’t you be approving resolutions and then fighting to get them implemented? If they ignore it you can fucking sanction them. Use it to justify stopping arms sales and aid.
America cannot escape their responsibility for this, IMO. If they’d voted for a cease fire and Israel had ignored it, it would be Israel’s fault. The way it stands America shares the blame, whether they like it or not.
As I mentioned, the best chance for the US to influence Israel is for it to not take an adversarial role. It’s like negotiating with a hostage taker. (I hate oversimplified analogies in foreign policy, but this one works really well). A hostage negotiator tries to sympathize with the hostage taker because it’s the best way to get the hostages out safely. America has tried to thread the needle between putting pressure on Israel and remaining supportive. It hasn’t had much success, but it’s the best course open to us.
I am not of the opinion that moral considerations don’t belong in foreign policy, but moral judgements like assigning “blame” can be antithetical to achieving moral ends. The second you label a foreign government as “genocidal” you lose all ability to influence them with anything but military force.
I actually agree with you that America gets a lot of the blame for what is happening but, most of the fault comes from things before October 7. I also fault Biden for a lot of that, and I think he has been far too over the top in supporting Israel publicly. What I think they are getting bad press for is the broad strategy of trying to restrain Israel while maintaining the relationship.
Trump is worse than Biden on anything and everything. But if any president can get away with supporting a genocide campaign, is this not the way they get away with it? By simply claiming it will ruin their campaign efforts?
It’s sad ppl only read your first sentence and then are fully satisfied with whatever shit you throw on, as long as you don’t specifically say ‘Biden is really bad’
I think it’s Biden’s responsibility to not support genocide, he owes it to his voters, and if he wants to keep them, he needs to change.
A president has already gotten away with it. Trying to selectively punish Biden now is actually a bit of hypocrisy. We should have done it in the first place. But we largely got in that position because of people who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Clinton, etc.
Biden’s moves are optically bad. But make a lot of sense as far as strategy goes. Traditionally. You have a much more powerful position to bargain as an ally than as an enemy. But that does not stop people like yourself from making hyperbolic claims.
Don’t get me wrong. Eileen, libertarian and communist. I have no real investment in Biden. I’m simply intelligent enough to know that he or Trump are going to win. And that he is by far the better choice. Which you yourself said. You just want to make some example of him despite your own face etc.
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Unfortunately, the Democrats keep going back to the well of “what are you going to do, vote for the other guy?” Their success on this has been hit or miss the last few cycles. In fairness, it’s been a viable strategy in the past, if Democrats can get those few persuadable voters in the middle of the political spectrum to vote Democratic and not Republican, that’s a net win for the Democratic candidate. But, that begs the question of “are there enough persuadable voters left to offset losses when parts of your base stay home?” With Biden’s continued support for Israel’s actions, it seems that their political calculus says, “yes”.
However, we’ve seen this go both ways in the last few cycles. Clinton deployed the tactic in 2016 and commenters were out in force to brow-beat any of the deplorables who offered anything less than a full-thoated support of her turn. It got her the popular vote, but that has never mattered, she lost the election. The “vote blue no matter who” force was on full display again in 2020 and managed to eek out a win. And here you are again, ramping up for 2024. It’s going to be interesting to see how it works out this time.
Biden in 2020 had the advantage of being somewhat unknown. Everyone knew him as Obama’s Vice President and that provided him some of Obama’s popularity. This time around, he’s much more of a known quantity and he’s going to be running on his own record. Brow-beating people with “anyone but Trump” seems less likely to work when voters may be looking at specific policies and actions which they find at odds with their beliefs. When Biden was more of an unknown, it was easy for voters to map their own views onto him. We see this with polls which include “generic Democrat/Republican” as an option. People map their own views onto the “generic” view and so are more supportive. When a candidate becomes a known quantity, support can drop off, as the voters know which areas they agree and disagree with a particular politician. In the same way, Biden’s policies are now more understood by the voters and people may be less inclined to support him based on those policies.
Personally, I’m doubtful this sort of brow-beating is going to work this cycle. Biden’s popularity isn’t fantastic and he’s too well known for people to map their views onto him. Moreover, responding to people being upset with his actions with a brow-beating seems like a poor response to peoples’ legitimate issues. It seems more likely to convince them to disengage or push back even harder. Sure, what are they going to do, vote for the other guy? No, probably not, but they may also not show up on election day. And with the closely divided state of the US electorate, that might just be enough to swing things the other way.
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Since when is Centrist defined as “I will shutdown the border as soon as you sign that bill”, “More kids in cages than the last guy”, “No prosecutions for leaders who incite a violent coup”, “More weapons for genocide”, “Let’s destroy the economy of our allies”, “We must keep the torture center at Guantanamo open”, “Who’s Epstein?”, “No I won’t pardon Peltier”, “No I won’t commute sentence of political prisoners”, “Yes, more black people in jail”, “Yes, it’s OK for prisoners to produce $11Bn in goods for private companies through slave labor”, “I swear we’ll do something about women’s health but it won’t be part of our political platform for the election”.
All of the evidence says we have the same two groups of white supremacist leaders we have always had: the plantation owners who bought the slaves, and the financiers who sold the slaves. You want to claim that the financiers are “centrist” in that formulation because they don’t personally whip people?
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Do you, as a group, though?
Every time someone posts an article about how it’s a bad thing that Biden is actively contributing to a genocide, the top comment is Trump whataboutism.
Yes, Trump is much worse, both on Israel and in general, but that’s not the fucking point!
Biden ain’t doing shit. He’s gonna go to Michigan and lie, then he’s going to maintain the same policies the US has for decades. It’s silly to think otherwise. And so it goes.
Except that the only two actual choices for the next 4 year cycle are Trump and Biden. Do that really us the point.
Putting your progressive politics focus on the president is a losing game, anyway. Praxis is local.
Wouldn’t this energy be better invested in getting Biden to stop supporting the Israeli genocide so that his Arab and Muslim voters don’t abandon him?
When it comes to American politics and actually affecting change, I think the energy is best invested in supporting progressive candidates from the bottom (local) up (national). Go to the primaries and vote for any candidate you can that is closer to your views if there are any. But when the time comes to vote for Biden, Trump, or abstain, anything other than voting for Biden is a vote for Trump, who is far worse in every conceivable way.
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Anyone who doesn’t vote Biden deserves trump.
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Hey yo, bozo, you think Trump would be better?
I didn’t realize the primary was over.
It’s funny how that and the fact that the Democratic party has already, against it’s own rules, removed all candidates other than Biden from the ballots in 10% of the States never gets brought up.
Instead we get a bunch of people posting in an attempt to shame people into voting for someone who supports genocide because ‘what else are you going to do’
I wish the Democratic party acted like Trump was the existential threat we all recognize him to be.
So as long as he’s marginally better than a deranged fascist rapist, criticism of him isn’t allowed at all?
Fuck off with that authoritarianism bullshit!
I definitely feel like so many actual democrats are starting to show similar signs as MAGAts did. It’s been there to an extent, but holy shit is it getting bad. Now it’s either love him or you’re a borderline terrible person.
That might be true, but in this timeline, both of them have been president, and only one has committed genocide. If Biden wants to make the case that a FORMER president who HASN’T committed genocide would be worse, then he needs to do a little better than committing genocide himself.
Um, what? How are you entirely unaware of the Trump administration’s support of Saudi Arabia commiting genocide in Yemen while Saudi officials dumped loads of cash at Trump resorts?
Just for the records, the same Yemen genocide that Biden continued to support and the same Yemen that he is now directly bombing?
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On foreign policy the US remains a genocidal bully with questionable morals and alliances. But domestically the Democrats present a veneer of somewhat moral, inclusive values. So with the presented choice I would recommend to go with the seemingly moral guy and try to hold him accountable, rather than vote for the fascist maniac that acts the same domestically and foreign.
Just hope you get locally active to organize a stronger left for the future.
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He’s not my president. Can’t do much but protest here and hold my own representatives accountable.
I can’t fault anyone for not voting for a war criminal.
The Canadian Conservative party is the one that usually runs on “imagine/look at how bad the other guy would be” as a party platform. It’s a bad look and a sign that you have nothing better. It’s politicking for the sake of politicking.
It is a bad look and a sign of a lack of good options, but that’s the situation.
Also, all Canadian parties run like that except for the Greens and the Bloc, and it’s probably because they know they won’t form a government