Serious The Politics Thread

[Pigbeeef]

Politics were never really my thing, but I always see it in my news feeds, reddit, etc...
So here I am talking about the stuff I see.
Every single day its just the left and right party bashing each other on various topics and every single perspective I see are full of bias from one of the sides, so I really don't know the whole story or what's actually going on.
So uhhh, can somebody explain to me all the stuff going on and stuff about the conservatives and the liberals? Without any bias, I have seen too much of it...
I hardly know anything about the nitty gritty stuff, so somebody pls explain it to me, thanks.


(also religon should separate from politics, but that's just me.)

 

[ant4456]

For the first time in my life I will not be voting for the POTUS. I will vote down ballot but am otherwise leaving that section blank. To the liberals that think my vote matters, in the event Massachusetts flips red as a result, I'll take full credit for this historic protest vote.

Other Massachusetts person here, also not voting Liberal. I honestly feel literally cucked at the idea of voting for Joe Biden. He has spit on me, done nothing for me, has not helped me, and continues to use the tax dollars he promised to spend on things such as our education (I am a college student in around $10k debt now!) he did not.

Being basically disabled for almost a year also radicalized me even further when, being in one of the blue states, I applied for disability because I literally was bed-ridden, and they said the process would take an entire year. I am now thousands in medical debt and still also do not have a job.

Those are personal reasons, but of course, the biggest reason is just how fragrantly he has shown his distaste for his constituency with how he has handled Palestine by spending billions on genocide so we can continue to be a lapdog, hoping that we can keep a puppet state in the Middle East.

One could argue that this he is just a President which means he can't do anything and he's actually a victim, too, or whatever; but then the same people I've seen also generally believe that Trump somehow has the competency to turn the Presidency role into Godking Emperor Fascist Prestige getting his 25 killstreak in power and nuclear bombing Democracy, when he really just wants to make some money.

I will try to stop my Conservative Dad from voting Trump, because Trump is, yes, worse, but I am not going to vote for a party that basically despises me behind empty words.

 

[Local Dog]

Tbh I don't feel qualified to answer your question, but I think one statement of yours is quite interesting

Every single day its just the left and right party bashing each other on various topics and every single perspective I see are full of bias from one of the sides, so I really don't know the whole story or what's actually going on.

I feel the same way. The nature of the modern internet is that you'll mostly see the things you already agree with. In our overly politized world, there's no such thing as an unbiased way. And people started spending so much time in these algorithmic generated bubbles that their perspective on the real world have been completely skewed. I feel as if I cannot trust my own or the eyes of others anymore

I sometimes glimpse into the right wing space and I see a wide variety fallacies made about left wing politics, which ultimately boil down to "X person said Y, therefore, every person like X will also say Y!", I think leftist views on right wing politics oftentimes makes the same fallacies

Like when I go into right wing space, I see many views that at times are diametrically opposed. I see bible thumpers that liken Palestinians to followers of Moloch and declare Israel's genocide as a holy war against Satan. I see /pol/ posters wanting the complete destruction of Israel and the Jewish world control, wishing for Palestine's freedom

I guess right wing politics are similarly varied as left wing politics are. There's a lot of fragmentation going on with right wing parties in Europe. And that the picture people on either side have of the other may not necessarily equate to being true

Creating these bubbles has genuinenly destroyed political discourse. I try to be as informed as possible, I listen to opinions I disagree with and I study what I can, and even now my view of people of opposing opinions is probably tainted by this bubbling

We are no longer discussing politics, we are discussing the public appearance of politics by the measurements and views we are fed to by those in power

 

[Divine Retribution]

Politics were never really my thing, but I always see it in my news feeds, reddit, etc...
So here I am talking about the stuff I see.
Every single day its just the left and right party bashing each other on various topics and every single perspective I see are full of bias from one of the sides, so I really don't know the whole story or what's actually going on.
So uhhh, can somebody explain to me all the stuff going on and stuff about the conservatives and the liberals? Without any bias, I have seen too much of it...
I hardly know anything about the nitty gritty stuff, so somebody pls explain it to me, thanks.

Yeah, you're never going to get an unbiased explanation (certainly not from me), the only way is to do your own research. I will say that "conservatives and liberals" is an entirely American framing that leaves out large portions of the political landscape that exist both within and outside of the U.S. Most leftists are not liberals, but political ideologies to the left of liberalism are not really represented in mainstream U.S. politics, which is why it's always a bit strange when some of the more unhinged members of the right describe lukewarm liberals like Biden as communists or something, but most of them haven't actually interacted with a leftist and have no idea what they actually believe.

 

[faint]

Politics were never really my thing, but I always see it in my news feeds, reddit, etc...
So here I am talking about the stuff I see.
Every single day its just the left and right party bashing each other on various topics and every single perspective I see are full of bias from one of the sides, so I really don't know the whole story or what's actually going on.
So uhhh, can somebody explain to me all the stuff going on and stuff about the conservatives and the liberals? Without any bias, I have seen too much of it...
I hardly know anything about the nitty gritty stuff, so somebody pls explain it to me, thanks.


(also religon should separate from politics, but that's just me.)

There is no prominent left-wing party in American politics so from the broader two party political party here, you have the Democrats and the Republicans. Both parties more or less share the same views on foreign policy, national security, and arguably the most important, maintaining the status quo with regard to wealth disparity. While these are massively broad topics, all you really need to know is that there will never be a year where the amount we spend on our military isn't at least as much as it was the year before. The framing of these 3 subjects may vary, though. For example, faith may get brought up by Republicans as an excuse for why we need to do something, while Democrats tend to focus on the worst case scenario outcome (see: abortion). If you look at basically any piece of legislation passed in the Senate that falls under the above, you'll often see voting results of something like 98-2.

All of this is to say that what you see in media is largely political theater, until it's not. Abortion was always such an easy topic to get people out to vote. Republicans could largely dangle that they'd do what they can to appeal Roe while Democrats would go "oh my God, look what the Republicans want to do. We need your money and for you to get out and vote." Of course, that only works until someone decides they actually want to move forward with it. If the Democrats cared about protecting abortion rights, they had plenty of opportunities to codify Roe, making it law, but once you do that you can no longer use the threat of an abortion ban to raise money.

As to how they differ, largely just on social issues. Democrats are typically going to be pro-LGTBQ, pro-some form of drug use, and mostly just "live and let live." Conservatives are more likely to want to return to "traditional" values. An easy way to understand their values is to ask yourself how we can move backwards, not forward. Liberals love that a gay man can drone strike the middle east while conservatives would prefer it be a straight man instead. But at long as the drone strike is successful both are happy at the end of the day.

What you are likely witnessing day to day is information intended to obfuscate who really believes/wants what and why that ideology is so bad. For example, outside of the two party system you have people to the left of the Democrats that may call themselves leftists, progressives, socialists, or communists. The latter two I will leave you to research as they're already well defined outside of the United States. Leftists and progressives do not feel the term Democrat suits them (largely for the reasons stated above) so you'll see topics like wealth disparity, prison reform, anti-war, anti-capitalism, and more discussed. The issue is that conservatives often use the term "The Left" as a collective term for Democrats + all of the above. I'd argue most of this is political theater and say they know the difference, but it's much easier to talk about your enemy as a giant collective instead of smaller demographics that may agree on a handful of issues. Biden is by no means part of "The Left" if you ask someone that identifies as a leftist nor are most liberals (Democrats). Leftists use the term to distinguish people who believe in forward progress (e.g. basic human rights) while conservatives just use it just to describe anyone to the left of them on a political spectrum.

Hope this helps. Wrote it half asleep so sorry if it didn't make sense at times.

 

[Coeur7]

Not gonna touch the rest of the points, but this is plainly bizarre. Is a Palestinian in East Jerusalem or Hebron responsible for what happened in Morocco or Iraq? Would you imply the Armenian genocide is no big deal because Turks were driven from the Balkans, for example? How does the existence of atrocities happening hundreds to thousands of miles away provide rhetorical cover for atrocities on a completely different group of people who had nothing to do with it?

To your questions: No, no, and it doesn't. All I intended to point out there is that both Israel and the larger Muslim world are responsible for amping up the mutual ethnic division/hatred in what was 2,000 years ago a single culture (though so is imperialism from the Seleucids onward), but it seems some people can't help but read it as "Muslims are even worse than Jews" instead because I expressed some degree of support for Israel. Incidentally, the Atlantic article I quoted (which I'm going to repost, because it contains about 75% of my points: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...ization-narrative-dangerous-and-false/675799/ -- at this point I think I should just have posted the link without comment) mentions this in the same way as well (if cautious to add that "this cannot be compared directly against each other", which I really should have added as well).

In general, nearly everyone who responded to me (with the exception of Divine Retribution) seems to argue that I said something entirely different from what I did. GatoDelFuego apparently thinks I wrote or meant "I'm on board with Israel bombing refugee camps". Obviously not. If my comment on Ukraine didn't indicate it, I would prefer if not a single shot were fired. The reason I included it was specifically to show I'm aware of Israel not being "the most moral army in the world".

Divine Retribution: You have a good point that we should not withhold judgment until a genocide is finished, and I'm sorry for phrasing it as though the total number of Palestinians killed couldn't possibly matter even if it was 200,000 or some such (when I reread it now, it does read that way). I should have said it differently, simply: 1% of the total population killed does not seem like an indicator of genocide yet IMHO, even if these were largely civilians (especially given the percentages of the undisputedly genocidal Nazi state... though their genocides also often happened after the military campaign, not during it; the war against the USSR is an exception) and the 2 million / >90% displaced worry me much more. An allegedly high proportion of civilians killed may be due to Israeli strategy rather than genocidal intent (aerial bombardment inherently kills more civilians than ground operations -- let's leave aside that it's hard to say who has correct numbers in this war), though you could well argue that this should be a reason to change said strategy. Again, I don't envy the people who make these sorts of decisions: if you send in ground troops instead, you're probably risking the death of proportionally more Israelis. "Should X more Israelis die so Y more Palestinians don't have to" is not exactly an easy question to answer.

EDIT: Dresden alone killed about 25,000 Germans. That was a single day of airstrikes on a city of decidedly less than 2 million inhabitants (treating the Gaza Strip as basically one single city is fair, I believe). And it was not genocide. I don't "gloss over" the death of 30,000 Palestinians, every one is one too many, but I do still think the apparent death toll is remarkably low given six months of (not uninterrupted) aerial bombardment.

I don't know how the Gazans (not even all Palestinians) are all that different from the WW2 Germans, TheMantyke. They voted a totalitarian dictatorship into power (probably not knowing entirely what that would entail) which started a war against a superior "Western" opponent it despises so much that it tries to ethnically cleanse them (or what else was Oct 7?). They may be less complicit in the actions of said dictatorship (who knows), it is certainly ridiculous to think they all supported it, but they are suffering all the same for it. Even so, the main reason I brought up WW2 at all was to point out that terrible civilian casualties (some sources claim 1.5 - 3 million out of 70 million Germans total -- yes, the number of military casualties is even higher, but this is still worse than the Israel-Hamas war at present) can occur in war without making the side inflicting them genocidal (which is not to say that you cannot criticize e.g. the bombing of Dresden as strategically senseless etc.). I could have brought up other wars, but this is simply the one I'm most familiar with. If comparing Hamas (not Palestinians as a whole) to the NSDAP was too much for you, I apologize, but at the same time I'm really not ready to retract it, either.

Oglemi: I think you very much missed that what I called "necessary" is the existence of a Jewish nation-state, not its war against Palestine (though admittedly I implied Hamas specifically was as bad as the Nazis... I stand by that, but I think by defending Neville Chamberlain over Churchill I also showed how "necessary" I think war is) and what I called "barbaric", a word I used not "throughout" but exactly twice, is the attack of Hamas on October 7 (and the Nazi government of Germany), not Gazans or Palestinians as a whole at all. If anything, by comparing them to Germans under Nazism I showed sympathy for them (inb4 I now get accused of "Nazi apologia". Consider that the Germans of Germany today might have been 30% or 70% Nazi if they had simply been born earlier; consider that they are not innately different from the Germans of 1932 or 1945, it is all education and environment. Yet no one doubts that Germans today are largely not notably more terrible people than anyone else, right?) That isn't "teetering on hate speech". I guess the streak of me being unable to make a single political post on any internet forum without it getting deleted continues.

 

[faint]

I don't know how the Gazans (not even all Palestinians) are all that different from the WW2 Germans, TheMantyke.

 

[Adeleine]

The discussion here provides especially good reasoning for why we shouldn't use the nazis as the barometer for what constitutes a genocide or not, wrt israel and generally speaking, and the harms that come from this practice being so common in the united states (and possibly elsewhere). The nazis are an unusual case among genocidaires for a variety of reasons, firstly the existence and nature of the military campaign accompanying their genocide. Given the large volume of territory that was directly held by the nazis and their allies, the length of time they held this territory, and the inevitable-yet-prolonged soviet westward operation, the expected percentage of targeted populations they would murder is higher than that of other genocidaires, regardless of the specificities of nazi intent. I was going to analyze this more in depth, but it just got really dark and dismal, so i'll just say something i imagine is fairly uncontroversial, "the nazis had more temporal, geographic, infrastructural, and military/political opportunities to murder higher percentages of their targeted groups than other genocidaires (inc. israel) did."

Secondly, we have very direct evidence not just that nazi crimes were committed, but that they were part of a systematized, top-down, centralized plan explicitly seeking extermination. It is fortunate that this evidence allows us to better understand nazi crimes, but it is unfortunate that this incontrovertible, retrospective nazi evidence exacerbates people's pre-existing desires for implausible levels of proof on intent. Firstly, it's just very unlikely for an ongoing, contemporary crime to provide us the depth and clarity of proof that we have for nazi crimes–we only begun to understand the depth of nazi crimes as the war began to end and the soviets discovered concentration camps, after all, and it took more time than that for us to have the clearest picture we do now. Perhaps more importantly in terms of changing peoples' opinions, the nazis are in the past, very widely known, and pretty uncontroversially bad; it is harder to e.g. convince Americans that adequate proof exists for a genocide perpetrated by their ally, an ally they reasonably often feel religious connections towards. Also, it's generally politically unsavvy to detail one's intent to exterminate a group, especially in the wake of the nazis and their notoriety. Regardless of israel's intents, 50 years after today, it would probably be very difficult to have as clear a picture as we have on the nazis. Perhaps not impossible, though, given some of the public outfacing communicaiton i have seen from israeli politicians and media about palestine and palestinians.

 

[awyp]

To your questions: No, no, and it doesn't. All I intended to point out there is that both Israel and the larger Muslim world are responsible for amping up the mutual ethnic division/hatred in what was 2,000 years ago a single culture (though so is imperialism from the Seleucids onward), but it seems some people can't help but read it as "Muslims are even worse than Jews" instead because I expressed some degree of support for Israel. Incidentally, the Atlantic article I quoted (which I'm going to repost, because it contains about 75% of my points: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...ization-narrative-dangerous-and-false/675799/ -- at this point I think I should just have posted the link without comment) mentions this in the same way as well (if cautious to add that "this cannot be compared directly against each other", which I really should have added as well).

In general, nearly everyone who responded to me (with the exception of Divine Retribution) seems to argue that I said something entirely different from what I did. GatoDelFuego apparently thinks I wrote or meant "I'm on board with Israel bombing refugee camps". Obviously not. If my comment on Ukraine didn't indicate it, I would prefer if not a single shot were fired. The reason I included it was specifically to show I'm aware of Israel not being "the most moral army in the world".

Divine Retribution: You have a good point that we should not withhold judgment until a genocide is finished, and I'm sorry for phrasing it as though the total number of Palestinians killed couldn't possibly matter even if it was 200,000 or some such (when I reread it now, it does read that way). I should have said it differently, simply: 1% of the total population killed does not seem like an indicator of genocide yet IMHO, even if these were largely civilians (especially given the percentages of the undisputedly genocidal Nazi state... though their genocides also often happened after the military campaign, not during it; the war against the USSR is an exception) and the 2 million / >90% displaced worry me much more. An allegedly high proportion of civilians killed may be due to Israeli strategy rather than genocidal intent (aerial bombardment inherently kills more civilians than ground operations -- let's leave aside that it's hard to say who has correct numbers in this war), though you could well argue that this should be a reason to change said strategy. Again, I don't envy the people who make these sorts of decisions: if you send in ground troops instead, you're probably risking the death of proportionally more Israelis. "Should X more Israelis die so Y more Palestinians don't have to" is not exactly an easy question to answer.

EDIT: Dresden alone killed about 25,000 Germans. That was a single day of airstrikes on a city of decidedly less than 2 million inhabitants (treating the Gaza Strip as basically one single city is fair, I believe). And it was not genocide. I don't "gloss over" the death of 30,000 Palestinians, every one is one too many, but I do still think the apparent death toll is remarkably low given six months of (not uninterrupted) aerial bombardment.

I don't know how the Gazans (not even all Palestinians) are all that different from the WW2 Germans, TheMantyke. They voted a totalitarian dictatorship into power (probably not knowing entirely what that would entail) which started a war against a superior "Western" opponent it despises so much that it tries to ethnically cleanse them (or what else was Oct 7?). They may be less complicit in the actions of said dictatorship (who knows), it is certainly ridiculous to think they all supported it, but they are suffering all the same for it. Even so, the main reason I brought up WW2 at all was to point out that terrible civilian casualties (some sources claim 1.5 - 3 million out of 70 million Germans total -- yes, the number of military casualties is even higher, but this is still worse than the Israel-Hamas war at present) can occur in war without making the side inflicting them genocidal (which is not to say that you cannot criticize e.g. the bombing of Dresden as strategically senseless etc.). I could have brought up other wars, but this is simply the one I'm most familiar with. If comparing Hamas (not Palestinians as a whole) to the NSDAP was too much for you, I apologize, but at the same time I'm really not ready to retract it, either.

Oglemi: I think you very much missed that what I called "necessary" is the existence of a Jewish nation-state, not its war against Palestine (though admittedly I implied Hamas specifically was as bad as the Nazis... I stand by that, but I think by defending Neville Chamberlain over Churchill I also showed how "necessary" I think war is) and what I called "barbaric", a word I used not "throughout" but exactly twice, is the attack of Hamas on October 7 (and the Nazi government of Germany), not Gazans or Palestinians as a whole at all. If anything, by comparing them to Germans under Nazism I showed sympathy for them (inb4 I now get accused of "Nazi apologia". Consider that the Germans of Germany today might have been 30% or 70% Nazi if they had simply been born earlier; consider that they are not innately different from the Germans of 1932 or 1945, it is all education and environment. Yet no one doubts that Germans today are largely not notably more terrible people than anyone else, right?) That isn't "teetering on hate speech". I guess the streak of me being unable to make a single political post on any internet forum without it getting deleted continues.

People aren't reading it as 'oh my goodness' Coeur7 is saying "Muslims are even worse than Jews" but your biasness is shown throughout this post and your last.

I wouldn't compare your initial post to The Atlantic because your post was quite aggressive in tone and why you gotten multiple responses in a short period of time.

Okay so if you aren't fine with bombing refugee camps than why treat causalities as just a number and not actual human lives being lost because that's how you sounded on your initial post. Like what do you mean that you don't particularly care whether 40 babies were beheaded in less symbolic ways? If you keep commenting with this tone your posts will continue to be deleted.

* The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 was barbaric, inexcusable, and genocidal in intent. Although of course the POTUS (or anyone) should be more careful than to regurgitate war propaganda from either side, I don't particularly care whether 40 babies were beheaded, or merely 29 children killed in some less "symbolic" way. Nor do I care that the attack caused fewer civilian casualties than Israel's subsequent siege of Gaza; this is only because Hamas didn't have the resources to do worse (and recall: it was the worst massacre of Jews in a single day since Nazi Germany) and is leveraging its lack of military power into a PR campaign of compassion for the "underdog". It was also not some kind of spontaneous reaction to an Israeli "provocation"; the war had long been planned in advance.

As DR said you cant determine a genocide until after the war is done (I personally see it as genocide of Palestinians but that's my opinion and I'm not going to back it up, because we can just argue semantics for days)

Don't you realize that bringing WWII back up is not a 1:1 ratio at all, its not very helpful so I wouldn't keep bringing it up to back up your thoughts it just adds an extra layer of TLDR text. Nazis =/= Hamas Troopers lol, the comparison is moot.

 

[TheMantyke]

I don't know how the Gazans (not even all Palestinians) are all that different from the WW2 Germans, TheMantyke.

why does my username have to be in the worst sentence on smogon.com

 

[lilyhollow]

I think one flaw in the argument about "Palestinians being comparable to WW2 Germans because they elected Hamas" is that Hamas are not Nazis, and in fact are extremely anti-Nazi, which we see by the regular videos they put out of their resistance operations against the IDF.

Here is a short pamphlet released by Hamas that goes over the reasons for their military operations, responses to Israeli allegations about Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and more:
Mod edit: the link here was removed. Direct links to propaganda and manifestos, particularly those that describe attacks against civilians as "necessary" is under mod review.

I highly recommend reading the whole pamphlet for anyone who wants to actually see the perspective of one of the resistance factions directly, instead of just having things filtered through western media intent on demonizing the resistance. However, here are a few choice quotes:

Avoiding harm to civilians, especially children, women and elderly people is a religious and moral commitment by all the Al-Qassam Brigades’ fighters. We reiterate that the Palestinian resistance was fully disciplined and committed to the Islamic values during the operation and that the Palestinian fighters only targeted the occupation soldiers and those who carried weapons against our people.

Maybe some faults happened during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’s implementation due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and the chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza.

As attested by many, the Hamas Movement dealt in a positive and kind manner with all civilians who have been held in Gaza, and sought from the earliest days of the aggression to release them, and that’s what happened during the week-long humanitarian truce where those civilians were released in exchange of releasing Palestinian women and children from Israeli jails.

Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.

The Palestinian people and peoples across the world realize the scale of lies and deception these governments that back the Israeli narrative practice in their attempts to justify their blind bias and to cover the Israeli crimes. These countries know the root causes of the conflict which are the occupation and the denial of the right of the Palestinian people to live in dignity on their lands.

On top of this, it is difficult to see Palestinian resistance groups as "Nazis" when day after day we see video clips of their fighters carrying out disciplined military operations against a much larger and more technologically-advanced force which bulldozes Palestinian homes, bombs bakeries, invades hospitals, and murders thousands of children.

What clips do the Israelis upload? Soldiers celebrating while detonating homes or destroying toy shops. Soldiers posing for pictures wearing the underwear of the women they've displaced or killed. Soldiers holding up pride flags or proposing to their girlfriends surrounded by a wasteland that was once a town that they destroyed. Or how about the small Israeli children stomping on food aid meant for starving Palestinians? And this is just what they are openly posting about online, on purpose!

The idea that we are supposed to fear or condemn a group whose aim is to resist this is perverse. Thankfully, this is only becoming more and more obvious to people as they are exposed to reality, and there is no going back.

 

[Divine Retribution]

About half of Gaza's population is under 18 (and this group is by all accounts very represented in the death tolls), and could not have participated in the 2006 election. That's not touching upon any of the other issues with the comparison, but I'm fucking sick of people using the idea that Gazans voted for HAMAS as an excuse for the mass slaughter of civilians when more than half of them categorically could not have voted at all when HAMAS was elected.

 

[GatoDelFuego]

GatoDelFuego apparently thinks I wrote or meant "I'm on board with Israel bombing refugee camps". Obviously not. If my comment on Ukraine didn't indicate it, I would prefer if not a single shot were fired. The reason I included it was specifically to show I'm aware of Israel not being "the most moral army in the world".

No, it's your extremely callous tone that you use to describe the conflict. You describe the actions of literally bombing refugees to kill the target -- wow. What a tough decision. They're over there making the difficult choices in israel. to seemingly give a dispassionate response to _literal_ war crimes, while you claim to be 'on the side of peace'.

I'm glad you hope for a peaceful solution. This is open warfare and it has been going on a long time. But only one party in this conflict has their knee on the throat of the other. Getting clawed by a cat you're actively trying to drown is not the act of a "vicious animal". You should remember that israel has directly funded hamas during its rise to power, has funded them in the 2020s, and was warned about the incoming hamas attack by MUSLIM nations and chose to do nothing about it. This is because hamas is a very convenient excuse for genocide.

 

[gvmgvm40]

To your questions: No, no, and it doesn't. All I intended to point out there is that both Israel and the larger Muslim world are responsible for amping up the mutual ethnic division/hatred in what was 2,000 years ago a single culture (though so is imperialism from the Seleucids onward), but it seems some people can't help but read it as "Muslims are even worse than Jews" instead because I expressed some degree of support for Israel.

Well, if you put one after the other, that's what the implication is. If I told you "American colonists pushed out Native Americans. There were also Native American raids on the colonists" with no other explanation, you wouldn't perceive the two as completely independent statements, you would rightly infer from the context that I'm equivocating the two, or that I was justifying one by the other.

Incidentally, the Atlantic article I quoted (which I'm going to repost, because it contains about 75% of my points: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...ization-narrative-dangerous-and-false/675799/ -- at this point I think I should just have posted the link without comment) mentions this in the same way as well (if cautious to add that "this cannot be compared directly against each other", which I really should have added as well).

I had a look, and I disagree with much of the Atlantic article, including the opening paragraph ("most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis" -- no, it does not "implicitly endorse" any killing or deportation, despite what pundits keep repeating), but despite how much the tone of the author deeply and utterly repulses me, I do agree that "The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity". I do not think that killings of civillians should be handwaved away or justified, so at least I could see your points in parts of it. This of course goes for both sides, though - I've rarely seen the same sensitivity in murder being unjustifiable when it comes to Gazan civillians, despite the extremely well-documented and widespread civillian murders of the IDF, the ongoing blockade and the intentional mass destruction of infrastructure and housing that makes Gaza simply unlivable for its inhabitants.

If we're posting articles, here's one I agreed the most with in the aftermath of Oct 7: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/but-not-like-this

I don't know how the Gazans (not even all Palestinians) are all that different from the WW2 Germans, TheMantyke. They voted a totalitarian dictatorship into power (probably not knowing entirely what that would entail) which started a war against a superior "Western" opponent it despises so much that it tries to ethnically cleanse them (or what else was Oct 7?). They may be less complicit in the actions of said dictatorship (who knows), it is certainly ridiculous to think they all supported it, but they are suffering all the same for it. Even so, the main reason I brought up WW2 at all was to point out that terrible civilian casualties (some sources claim 1.5 - 3 million out of 70 million Germans total -- yes, the number of military casualties is even higher, but this is still worse than the Israel-Hamas war at present) can occur in war without making the side inflicting them genocidal (which is not to say that you cannot criticize e.g. the bombing of Dresden as strategically senseless etc.). I could have brought up other wars, but this is simply the one I'm most familiar with. If comparing Hamas (not Palestinians as a whole) to the NSDAP was too much for you, I apologize, but at the same time I'm really not ready to retract it, either.

The obvious point is that the conflict didn't start yesterday. As you also acknowledged in your previous post, 700k Palestinians were displaced in 1948, and those that stayed inside the borders of historical Palestine (i.e. West Bank/Gaza) have been living under a military regime that denies them equal rights since 1967. Many of them have been displaced for a second or third time due to the land seizures of the Israeli state or by the settlers. Those in the West Bank deal with limitations of their movement by walls and checkpoints, they deal with house demolitions and building limitations, with regular attacks by settlers, and there is almost total impunity when they're subject to crimes (including recent pogroms) by settlers or the IDF. They live literally side-by-side with the settlers, but a different legal regime applies to them! One of them is protected by the Israeli state and have full political, social and civil rights, while the other is openly detested and can be killed for no apparent reason or held in administrative detention indefinitely. Those in the Gaza Strip, on the other hand, have been living under a blockade for almost 2 decades at this point, and have seen indiscriminate bombings of their territory every other year or so. This isn't just a historical crime - all of this happened in living memory and it is something ongoing. Given all of this, it is ingenious to compare Hamas to Nazis. Are you somehow surprised that Palestinians don't like the state of Israel? When it comes to their motivations, there is virtually nothing in common.

 

[SidTheShuckle]

I wanna branch off the topic and talk about the elections in India. This is probably the first time I’m using the politics thread coz usually I use the Discord a lot to talk about politics.

Has anyone been following the Lok Sabha turnout? It looks to be high turnout yet millions are still ineligible to vote, I would assume mostly migrants. I predict Modi will get a third term and the INDIA alliance will fall apart. Don’t know how big of a win the BJP will get but India is slowly becoming more of a one party Hindutva state as time goes on.

hey, at least Kerala isn’t Modi-fied

 

[Dead by Daylight]

I wanna branch off the topic and talk about the elections in India. This is probably the first time I’m using the politics thread coz usually I use the Discord a lot to talk about politics.

Has anyone been following the Lok Sabha turnout? It looks to be high turnout yet millions are still ineligible to vote, I would assume mostly migrants. I predict Modi will get a third term and the INDIA alliance will fall apart. Don’t know how big of a win the BJP will get but India is slowly becoming more of a one party Hindutva state as time goes on.

hey, at least Kerala isn’t Modi-fied

I find it very difficult to foresee Modi not winning the elections this year especially with the recent fractures in the opposition alliance. I agree with you that India is becoming a one-party state and that worries me - the anti-Muslim rhetoric is escalating according to BBC and we could see a violent future soon

 

[Gimmicky]

Liberals love that a gay man can drone strike the middle east while conservatives would prefer it be a straight man instead. But at long as the drone strike is successful both are happy at the end of the day.

maybe the most accurate way i've ever seen the democrat and republican parties described and it's on smogon dot com

 

[Local Dog]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...ry-blm-protester/?itid=hp_mv-latest_p006_f033

What the fuck is this

You can commit murder in broad fucking daylight and be pardoned if your ideology is the "right" one

Everyone has a right to self defense, but there has to be proof that it was self defense. It was disproven that it was, and yet, a fucking murderer gets to be free

 

[meamPearl]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...ry-blm-protester/?itid=hp_mv-latest_p006_f033

What the fuck is this

You can commit murder in broad fucking daylight and be pardoned if your ideology is the "right" one

Everyone has a right to self defense, but there has to be proof that it was self defense. It was disproven that it was, and yet, a fucking murderer gets to be free

Nepotism at its finest nepotism includes friends too

 

[Celticpride]

If the Democrats cared about protecting abortion rights, they had plenty of opportunities to codify Roe, making it law, but once you do that you can no longer use the threat of an abortion ban to raise money.

The democrats only had a supermajority in the senate for a few months in 2009, and were focused on using those votes to break the filibuster to pass the ACA. For a long time there were also anti-abortion Democrats in red states, for example Ben Nelson and Joe Donnelly (the last pro-life Dem in the house got indicted on bribery charges). Anything less than a supermajority, and the GOP just uses the same levers to roll it back when they have power again, and they might break the filibuster anyways even if the Dems codified in 2009 via supermajority. Then we’re just banning/unbanning abortion every few years in perpetuity, and…. fundraising based on that.

The real takeaway would be that the judiciary matters a lot, and having a president in place to nominate judges to the Supreme court is massively important (along with term limits on judges, etc). “Codifying Roe” in a durable manner is a lofty goal, but there’s other smaller fights to be had along the way, see the Biden admin fighting for access to mifepristone and against Idaho’s ban on abortions during emergency care, and those fights matter.

 

[ant4456]

maybe if the democratic party isn't getting the votes, they should work as ruthlessly as the conservative party does to appeal to their constituencies and actually get what they want

the republicans get shit done with minorities, hate them all we want their constituencies are eating and when they are fed, the conservative party creates new battlegrounds for them to win at

the democratic party always acts defensively where we vote them in to prevent bad, not to get something big. if the democratic party wins there will be some random guy who is a fake democratic which means that they can't actually at a federal level keep abortion, and then they will milk the issue until at least midterms. because the democratic party needs the republicans to do awful shit to get us to vote instead of good policy. that's why establishment democrats were paying for trump's election in 2015, because they wanted a weak opponent... oops!

the democratic party wants to not do shit and still win

 

[Celticpride]

maybe if the democratic party isn't getting the votes, they should work as ruthlessly as the conservative party does to appeal to their constituencies and actually get what they want

The dems have not lost an election cycle since 2016, they’ve been overperforming on all fronts. So they don’t really have a problem getting votes.

And 2020-2022 was a particularly prolific cycle given the house had a razor thin majority in the house. In the past 4 years, the dems have passed massive spending bills for chips, climate and infrastructure, expanded the amount of americans overtime eligible for overtime by a significant amount, passed legislation to cut down on junk fees and overdraft spending. While the supreme court shut down the blanket student debt cancellation, the biden admin still cancelled billions in student debt for the in targeted ways, for example those scammed by for-profit colleges and public service employees, and beefed up and expanded income based repayment plans. The amount of student debt in the US actually declined last year. 92% of americans 18-64 have healthcare. Real wage growth has been robust, unemployment is low, underemployment and prime age labor force participation are back to pre-2008 levels. Inflation is still a bit sticky, but the fed hiked rates quite a bit in a small amount of time, and the economy didn’t crash.

 

[DerrickRose]

the republicans get shit done with minorities

what they get done outside of the supreme court since 2016?

 

[lilyhollow]

This common argument in favor of voting for the Democrats is captured really well by this Hillary Clinton tweet. I really like the tweet because it makes it clear what the flaw in the argument is.

https://x.com/HillaryClinton/status/1782400479743324603

"Vote for the Democrats! We don't have solutions to your problems, but we vaguely gesture towards them and do a few things here and there if they don't anger the billionaires who own us. We will fail and humanity will burn, but that is really great compared to Trump!"

No real solutions, no actual positive vision for humanity. People do not want this strange, proud celebration of failure. There is no reason for democrats to be surprised when people vote for buffoons like Trump, or don't vote at all. Or worse, they'll be scandalized at the idea of someone voting for a progressive or socialist third party candidate who actually does offer real solutions. Yes, it's true, some people actually want to be able to look forward to humanity's future.

 

[Celticpride]

This common argument in favor of voting for the Democrats is captured really well by this Hillary Clinton tweet. I really like the tweet because it makes it clear what the flaw in the argument is.

https://x.com/HillaryClinton/status/1782400479743324603

View attachment 633381


"Vote for the Democrats! We don't have solutions to your problems, but we vaguely gesture towards them and do a few things here and there if they don't anger the billionaires who own us. We will fail and humanity will burn, but that is really great compared to Trump!"

No real solutions, no actual positive vision for humanity. People do not want this strange, proud celebration of failure. There is no reason for democrats to be surprised when people vote for buffoons like Trump, or don't vote at all. Or worse, they'll be scandalized at the idea of someone voting for a progressive or socialist third party candidate who actually does offer real solutions. Yes, it's true, some people actually want to be able to look forward to humanity's future.

This tweet is extrapolating the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate portion and other climate legislation so far, not the Biden admin’s or the Democrats ultimate aims on the climate front. Read the disclaimer at the bottom for the scenarios considered. Additional legislation could drive it down even more and is not factored into the projections. We weren’t going to hit the target in one bill or even one presidential term, but not everything has to be done in one fell swoop. The positive vision is “look what we did with one piece of legislation, that’s a lot of progress! Think about what we could do with more opportunities?”