0
Book Review: Fifty years later, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Novel about Utopian Anarchists Is as Relevant as Ever
(www.scientificamerican.com)
Like, this wasn't "I'm sacrificing the Palestinian people for my own safety", it was "This is literally the least bad option for Palestine as well." People in Palestine understood this. But apparently it's too emotionally charged for some online 'leftists'.
Tap for spoiler
No, the least bad option is no genocide.
If everyone who tried to quell dissent on Harris's policies on Gaza instead pushed on the administration I guarantee they would've changed their mind. They adapted other issues through out the campaign. But they didn't on this one because they thought they could get away with a genocide and still win the election.
And even your article says they don't think Harris winning will stop the suffering either, so very motivating for people /s. If you want voters, you need to give them motivation. Apathy is the worst thing that can happen for turn out. Telling them to vote for the person killing their family sounds like the most demotivating thing I can think of. It's not emotionally charged, well it is, but it's just electoral strategy, too.
The good news is that they have established their power as a coalition, and hopefully we can leverage this in the future. Now the Zionists aren't the only votes they have to be scared of losing, and we can build on that to pull the Dems left. Maybe. I hope lol.
This is quite hilarious considering the same people you're defending.
Tap for spoiler
What people? Those trying to push the party left so it doesn't lose like this every year? Genocide victims? Sorry, but I will never feel bad about defending people fighting against a genocide or suffering from one. You're willing to try but my morals don't bend that way.
See, every time a Dem loses, I'm told it's messaging, but every time it's pointed out what messages the Dem actually put out, it's drowned out by the fact that both left and right do nothing but beat the drum on whatever they see as the Dem candidate's weakness regardless of what their strengths are.
Tap for spoiler
True, everyone has an opinion. The right says the Dems are too far left, but Kamala hewed to the center hard this time, including a record number of Republicans at the DNC, and still lost. There are a bunch of other reasons I think this keeps revealing itself to be false (blue candidates, including women, and ballot measures winning down ballot all over the country even in states that went to Trump, Trump winning on vague populist vibes of the economy as revealed in opinion polls with the other fascist part of his policies like immigration or scary trans people being ranked less in priority, his more multi-racial voters suggesting that too, the change in numbers between 2020 for Trump and Harris shows people not switching to conservative but instead just a depressed turn out, the Muslim vote numbers for Biden in 2020 being like 86% compared to Harris in 2024 being something like 40%, etc). She ran a standard Democratic campaign emblematic of not only the current administration but every one during their lifetime since Reagan, and people are tired of neoliberalism, although most can't express that, they can still feel it. People hear about these nice, liberal policies, but they don't see it reflected in their bank accounts, so they stop caring about the Democrat's technocratic incremental 12 point plans after awhile, because they've heard these are happening under Biden, too, but they figure they must not do anything. But I guess that's just another opinion lol.
I know other people think it's her not having enough time or Biden not dropping out soon enough or something. That might have helped give her more time to spread her policies, but I doubt that was the main reason. I still think she could've won with the right strategy with the time she had and that huge upswing of energy when she entered the race.
I don't know, maybe something like saying the Palestinian people must be helped to “realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination” while calling for a ceasefire and saying she "will not be silent" on Gazan suffering?
Tap for spoiler
It's hard for people to believe that when the administration you are a part of says the same thing while continuing to arm the genocidal IDF army for the tunes of billions of dollars. Not to mention denying Palestinian speakers at the DNC while inviting families of hostages, bringing up October 7th first every interview and calling that the biggest tragedy, saying you wouldn't change anything from the Biden campaign, emphasizing Israel every time Palestine is brought up before and after Palestine, kicking out a Muslim person in the audience at a rally, sending the cops after protestors, saying we'll have the most lethal army in the world, saying Iran is the world's biggest threat while their neighbor is doing a genocide, her staff reiterating that an arms embargo was 100% off the table removing any chance of leverage to enact material change, Trump going to their community before you do, and it goes on and on... That quote comes off insincere when everything else you do and say indicates the opposite. The fact that another red line has come and passed without the US changing position on Israel proves the Biden administration's insincerity on this issue even more.
Oh, wait, that's right, the selfsame people who said "Calling for a ceasefire is all I need to vote for the Dem candidate" immediately moved their goalposts once it happened, because Palestinian genocide was never the actual issue. They don't give a single fuck about more deaths or less deaths. They just want to play purity politics, and people giving them asspats for doing so are encouraging this behavior.
Tap for spoiler
Nah, it's because the White House purposefully and cynically used a different definition of the word ceasefire than the one all the activists and aid workers understood it to mean. This article explains it well. A ceasefire without leverage would cause the genocide to resume immediately after a hostage exchange, and everyone knows this because Israel is the aggressor and has been since the 1920's. If her campaign didn't clarify that an arms embargo is 100% off the table, against our own laws btw, than maybe just a call for a ceasefire would've worked, but I doubt it without some sort of explanation of how she was going to accomplish it. She was willing to explain how she'd accomplish other policies, such as through tax credits and such, but not that one for some reason except to say Diplomacy which hasn't worked for the last year, and everyone knows won't work now.
"Bullying is when you point out that a strategy is dogshit and senseless, and the more you do it, the more bullying it is."
I hope not, because that's what I've been saying about the Democratic electoral strategy since before the election lol. I see bullying as more ad hominem attacks, like telling people if they don't vote for the person arming the person killing their family, you'll exult in them all dieing or getting deported. Not saying you've done that specifically, buts it's gotten pretty racist in here lately (but not as bad as Reddit at least).
Like, I don't know what the fuck to tell you. You voted for Harris, so you clearly understand on some level that abstaining is a dogshit answer, but you seem to be bending backwards to accommodate morons who've just willfully assisted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people, minimum, for no other reason than their own vanity.
Tap for spoiler
The thing is, I thought it would've been a lot easier to convince the candidate to change their genocide policy than convincing thousands of people to change their moral values. Essentially, it's because I wanted her to win that I foresaw a problem with her electoral strategy and kept trying to do something. It's why I started that vote swapping thread that went nowhere and kept trying to encourage empathizing with the unhappy people in the US rather than ignoring them. Because I saw blaming the voters in 2016 didn't fix shit, and instead we're going to have to learn some lessons. But no one was learning them, instead trusting that 2020 wasn't just a fluke because of the pandemic.
Idk man, I know we're all hurt right now, but at this point I'm seriously losing hope in the Democratic party, and I blame them 1000% more than the voters because if I could see the mistakes being made there's no way other more qualified people couldn't either. If they win 2028 it's purely because continual enshittification and failing material conditions means that the voters will vote against anyone in power during the death throes of this falling empire, and not because they'll change anything. That's my guess - that unless another Bernie-like figure with Obama's charisma comes, in who's also promising sweeping changes to the internal systems of the US and not just trying to treat the symptoms - that we're going to be switching off on one-term Presidents forever.
At least some other people are realizing this, too. I just hope that the country is not too atomized to assemble some sort of alternate coalition before its too late. We need to get off these tracks before we fall into fascism.
Sorry for the length of all this, I won't blame you if you skip most of It. Adding spoiler tags so it doesn't take up too much room in the thread. Honestly, this comment has been a great way to organize my thoughts and feeling on all this, too. It wasn't when I started, I didn't mean to subject you and Lemmy to it, I think we're all just looking for catharsis right now lol.
Fair. I think this graph of the personal savings rate the last 5 years explains everything. Both Biden and Harris were fighting an uphill battle against these numbers the whole time.
Notice how everyone's savings goes up during pandemic relief and then tanks as those benefits end and inflation continues to stay high?