GarbageShootAlt2 @ GarbageShootAlt2 @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

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.

You are right in general that SCMP is going to cheer on China, but MBFC is a stupid, question-begging, centrist website run by someone with no qualifications and spread around so centrists can use it as a "gotcha" in the style of an informal fallacy. I'm sure that others will have takedowns saved to share with you.

I think the article is good since it's just dryly reporting on a survey from what I can tell, I just sympathize with being wary.

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

The term neoliberal encompasses conservatives unless it's from the standpoint of a feudal society

I find it unfathomable how someone can come to that of all conclusions. Obviously she doesn't have a commitment to it religiously or out of ethnic supremacy, but it's just as obvious that she's interested in being the slay kween on top of the bloodiest empire in history, and so she knows it behooves her to take care of all of its apparati for maintaining power.

When you're a top-level politician like Kamala is failing-up into being, Israel's appeal to you in not the chump change from AIPAC (not that you don't take that too), it's Israel's actual use, the reason that AIPAC is allowed to exist when virtually no other foreign lobby is, that being that it spreads chaos and destruction among America's enemies in the Middle East.

The idea that AIPAC effectively authored and single-handedly perpetuates zionism in the US political establishment is both antisemitic and just plain stupid. Where do you think they got the money from?! It didn't just spring from Palestinian blood or from being Jewish or whatever, that money comes from the US initially! Or by proxy from US resources. The money AIPAC has is circling back to the US like in a money-laundering scheme.

I said "setting aside what we think of Hamas" for a reason, if that helps you interpret my meaning, I'm just doing a bad job managing both impulsively responding after the conversation ran its course and also avoiding getting into a useless dispute about the main force of military resistance to an ongoing genocide.

That's interesting. I clearly hadn't been giving those protestors enough credit, but the corollary of that is that Kamala, while an absolute zionist bastard, was still generalizing but not nearly as aggressively as I thought (there are definitely a bunch of triangles). I underestimated the ability of westerners to cut through zionist concern-trolling, even if not all present can.

Aside from the fact that she's clearly using it as an opportunity to make it look like the entire protest (and perhaps all pro-Palestine protest) took such a tact

pro-Hamas messages

If you mean "From the river to the sea" I swear to God