I am obliged to note that genocide does not need to be racial (it can target religion, sexuality, nationality, etc.), but your point stands because none of those apply either. I’ll just mark it in the Black Book of Capitalism and be content with that.
You formulated it as though you were bringing up something new: “you mean the same X who Y” is for introducing something new into the conversation in relation to X, with X here being Jill Stein. If you had just used David Duke as X and “who lead the KKK” as Y, it wouldn’t have been an absurd contribution.
Though it would still be a silly one, since people know who David Duke is, it’s not some obscure fact. He’s the single most recognizable name in connection with the KKK, perhaps along with the long-dead D.W. Griffith (but probably not).
starved a great many by just capitalist ideology, but that’s not really genocide…
Genocide doesn’t require bloodthirst, it does just fine with sacrifice whole populations for some other goal or accepting those deaths as “collateral”. The UN definition supports this.
What are you doing with cutesy sarcasm and cherrypicked headlines? Just look at the civilian death tolls. The immediately-presented numbers are 36k over 3.5 years to 42k over 1 year, and that’s again with massive under-reporting in the latter case.
Did you even read what I said? I directly acknowledged that the logical implication of my strategy is that Trump is more likely to win the upcoming election because I’m interested in how subsequent elections will be impacted. The calculus of “Always vote for the nearest viable candidate” is liberal dogma, yes, but it’s not the only strategy and I find it to be a bad long-term strategy, because it just incentivizes an accelerating rightward drift from the “left” candidate, leaving you with two right candidates.
Despite needing to re-explain myself, I took what you said at face value and not as just being condescending wank, and now I guess I have egg on my face for my trouble.
When I said:
and that there is only this one, totalizing crossroad of literal, immediate survival.
This was me saying “It frames things as though losing the election means that all is lost and there won’t be future elections.”
As I’m pretty sure I explained to you an hour ago in another thread, I think it’s an acceptable loss for the Democrats to lose an election to put pressure on them to change or else to establish that they are more loyal to the US project of Israel than they are to trying to win elections or do what voters want or anything like that.
I don’t proactively want Trump to win, but I find it totally acceptable since what sets him apart from other Republicans is not that he is especially fascist in the substance of what he is likely to do. It might actually be possible to browbeat me if we had a Tom “throne of Chinese skulls” Cotton or someone as the nominee, he actually represents something that could be totalizing to me, but Trump is just kind of a deranged grifter and Vance is a more even-keel grifter.
So to save us both time, no, I don’t think we agree on any points. I wasn’t commenting toward that end, I merely wanted to say that the comic is unhelpful.
There’s a genocide roughly 10x as large going on in Ukraine
Civilian deaths in Ukraine over the last ~3.5 years are still smaller than the substantially underestimated civilian death toll in Gaza after 1 year (which came from a very stringent set of definitions that basically can’t be executed on anymore because of Israel bombing the hospitals).
There’s no way you could get to this conclusion except some hysterical idea about Putin wanting to put all the Ukrainians in camps as though that’s what he did with Crimea.
I’m confused how you believe that Israel’s rabid ethnic cleansing campaign is a liberal democrat policy,
This is the form imperialism typically takes, an imperial “core” where things are relatively comfortable and humane and a “periphery” where things are extremely brutal. It’s more obvious when there’s a war the core has more direct involvement in, like Obama siccing the Air Force on Yemen in conjunction with the Saudis, but this too is a case of it.
This is question-begging a number of critical elements, e.g. that the “rafts” cannot be influenced by “passenger” input, and that there is only this one, totalizing crossroad of literal, immediate survival.
We can do it too:
You’re in a runaway train accelerating toward a cliff and the break only really stops acceleration, it doesn’t decelerate. You can sit in the engine room and hold down the break, and you’ll live longer, but you aren’t changing the fundamental dynamic of the situation, which ends in your eventual death. Conversely, you can jump off the train, surely injuring yourself, possibly crippling yourself, maybe even killing yourself, but it’s the only potential way to change the dynamic of being doomed to fall off the cliff.
Does this prove anything? No, it’s just a model of how some people think of the problem, not an argument. It would be really obnoxious and disingenuous to present it as an argument.
You were just so excited to use this talking point that you couldn’t be bothered to note that he was responding to it in the very comment you used it on.
As so many Harris-voting lemmitors have instructed me, stopping the genocide is not on the effective ballot as-presented, so no, they are not assisting continuing what is absolutely a genocide. The goal is that they either pressure Harris to not be a ghoul, because they presume she cares about winning more than aiding genocide (this is most likely false) or, if Harris sticks to her guns and either loses or wins by such slim margins that it makes the Dem winning next election without stopping Israel much more hazardous, they (the Muslim/Arab voters) can extract concessions, because even electoral politics doesn’t end with one election cycle, and some strategies aimed at maximizing some long term result can introduce a risk or even a guarantee of short-term costs.
I don’t believe, like I think those voters do, that Dems would trade Israel slaughtering with impunity even for a guaranteed victory, but I think them demonstrating that unwillingness has its own value, since the DNC needs to be brought down. I don’t expect you to agree to this and am not terribly interested in persuading you, I’m just offering an explanation.
It bugs me just saying “the Chinese” did it. It was the Chinese company Ex-Robot.
but quite another to have the most powerful country give their approval to do whatever it takes to end the conflict to Israel’s benefit.
Israel already has approval! The arguments on the phone are kabuki theater
But what’s stupid is when people think that Trump will somehow stop the genocide.
No one thinks this
It’s silly to act like individual values are some sacred, unassailable thing gifted to everyone’s soul by the heavens, rather than something that came from a combination of inborn human traits and memories*, i.e. they are something that is contingent, changing, and in no way above being questioned.
It’s also silly to act like it makes sense to just have a blanket acceptance of something if it’s an “individual value” even though, when we look at the world, individual values can sometimes be extremely fucked up and we shouldn’t allow people who would enact those values to abuse with impunity.
*“memories” is simplistic, but I don’t think it is catastrophically so.
It’s not “embracing Trump”, that’s what liberals like to frame it as for rhetorical effect. Calling it accelerationism is just willful ignorance towards what the intentions of the approach are. It’s a strategy oriented around timescale that is more than just this election (in stark contrast to the alarmist “Most important election of our lifetime” rhetoric of liberals) because there will be more elections and unconditional subservience to the dems in this election will encourage their lurching still further to the right in future elections.
The purpose is to make the Democrats choose between concessions to the left or letting the Republicans win. It’s not difficult to understand.
This is deeply disingenuous, because you’ve been continuously arguing that the Democrats are better on those things when you rattle off your lists in various conversations here. Like, I can sit here all day and think of issues and go through the histories both administrations have with them, but it won’t matter that both Trump and Biden did fuck all about trans rights* but you can just keep throwing progressive issues at a wall until I get tired of responding, despite having no ability to prove shit about them.
And come the next conversation with anyone else, you’ll keep pretending that Harris is better about immigration and so on, I suppose as a bluff that the people you’re talking to don’t know any better. It must be comfortable to not believe in anything while playing useful idiot for the Democrats.
*no I don’t give a shit about the enlistment thing and neither should you, plus it gets reversed back and forth by executive order anyway
Cuba, Vietnam, China, USSR, hell even the dprk. Look at life expectancy, literacy, infant and maternal mortality, extreme poverty metrics, worker self management systems, and moving from dictatorship to soviet style proletarian democracy
You are factually correct, but this is rhetorically a poor point to make unless your goal is to have the argument be an endless quagmire of tangents upon tangents (which I don’t think it is). Clearly you would generally know better than I, but I can’t help but feel that a simpler answer like:
“The liberal revolutions against feudalism broadly had a progressive character, though feudalists and conservatives generally portrayed them as barbarous, traitorous, heretical, etc. Socialist revolutions were likewise broadly progressive, with their rightward opponents portraying them the same way”
Would be a good way to touch on this point generally without just begging them so directly to vomit every red scare myth and reactionary reddit thread they’ve ever seen at you, or just leave because those things went through their mind and that was enough.
That’s me reading English. What I was referring to is a set phrase, but it’s not a fossilization, it’s still just what the words mean if you’re actively putting them together. God, this is such an annoying, pointless argument.