They won’t hear about the bad things, or they’ll be told it was the Democrats that did it, and they’ll be believe it. Convincing MAGA of reality is pointless while they’re still feeding from the trough of conservative shit. We’re better off protesting and being disruptive in combination with getting our shit together for next round, where hopefully we’ll have real primaries and get our first competent general election candidate since Obama.
Yeah, home advantage is less and less relevant every year. Once upon a time this would be news, but it’s a new era and he wasn’t even the presidential candidate.
Sort of, with the major distinction that you can just tell somebody water green tea is and they’ll know what green tea is. It’s a trivial fix. You can tell a Trump supporter that Harris is not a communist, and they won’t believe you for a million years, with all the facts in the world behind you.
Plain ignorance is part of it, but I really don’t think it’s the driving factor. You don’t vote for Trump because you lack some key knowledge, no matter how trivial that knowledge is. You vote for him because you’ve been inundated with conservative media for decades, and you have no grasp on reality anymore. You really believe Harris is going to hold you at gunpoint and replace your gas heaters with electric. You really believe she’s going to sell the United States to China for a hundred bucks. You might even believe there’s a war on men, a war on your religion, a war on everything that brings you meaning to your life. If I truly believed the things that conservative media was saying, I’d vote for him too.
It’s not just ignorance. It’s brainwashing.
And I very much recall at least two instances where he said this is the last election you’ll have to vote in. Is he going to find/create a way to suspend the 2028 election and stay in power? Who’s going to stop him?
That’s why I said it’s possible, I just don’t think it’s probable. People are loyal to Trump until they’re not. Nobody’s loyal to him because they like him or they think he’s a good guy, or because they think he’ll bring the country prosperity. They’re loyal because they think they can get something out of it. Most people aren’t in a position where they’re willing to give up literally everything to help this particular asshole become a dictator. Those that are are typically incompetent - see anything and everything related to stealing the 2020 election. They tried a LOT of things, but nothing came even close to working.
So they’ll try again, and I don’t think anybody’s doubting that. And I don’t think our institutions are particularly strong, but they’re probably strong enough to stop that kind of incompetence from leading to a dictatorship.
Let me be clear here. If we have a global nuclear war, that’s not recoverable, because every human on earth will be dead. If we enter a fascist dictatorship with today’s technology, that may not be recoverable, because we may see the permanent end of anything resembling a democracy.
I’m not saying there weren’t horrific atrocities committed during Trump’s reign. What I’m saying is that so far, there’s a chance future generations can live better lives.
The truth is it’s unlikely anything historically big is going to happen in the US. We saw what Trump did last time he was in office, and it was really bad, but it was recoverable. The fear isn’t that it’s likely, but that it’s far from a non-zero chance, and there’s very little we can do about it. That uncertainty is scary when we’ve had a relatively good time in recent decades.
Will we see a sudden shift toward a state where you can get jailed or murdered for being a dissident? Maybe, but probably not.
Will we see an escalation of the wars involving Israel, such that we see a WWIII and/or the first nuclear strike since WWII? Maybe, but probably not.
Will we see economic collapse causing widespread hunger and homelessness that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression? Maybe, but probably not.
The only thing that’s really a guarantee is that we’re another four years away from dealing with climate change, and while that’s massive for humanity down the line, individuals currently living in the US are probably going to be mostly fine. Not to say nobody will be affected - hurricanes, floods, fires, and so on - but it won’t cause catastrophic failure of society in the near future.
They should have given people on the left some reason to be motivated to vote though, not just fear.
This is the massive key that I really don’t think the Democratic party understands. When people are scared, they vote conservative. There are literal studies that show fear is the driving force behind conservative voters. Democrats need to make them feel safe. That’s one of the reasons Obama was so successful - he ran on change and hope. Fear works for Republicans. It doesn’t work for Democrats. But they see fear working for Republicans, so they copy it.
I’m not convinced that’s the reason, but if the country is so misogynistic it’s impossible to elect a woman, we need to stop putting women up for election. That’s shitty, but it’s better than Republicans winning.
The Democrats have managed to field two candidates so unelectable they lost to Donald fucking Trump. That’s how. And we, the Democratic constituents, are failing to either take over or dismantle the Democratic party so we can get a halfway decent candidate in. We fucking suck.
Very true! It’s hard to imagine Israel would be the same today without the particular cultural choices those first immigrants made. Thanks for the addition.
I think Al Jazeera is good for news related to the middle east - Al Jazeera has an Arab bias, the same way US news has a US/Israel bias. When there’s a conflict between US/Israel and the Arabs, I tend to be more sympathetic to the Arabs, so I prefer their news. Somebody with politics different from mine would disagree.
Plus they sometimes put out absolute fire like this: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/9/11/debate-in-nuclear-armed-former-colony-fails-to-reassure-global-community
Could just get this tattooed for how often it’s true.
True! That’s a good one to point out. It’s hard to overstate how significantly and suddenly the Arabs turned against the Jews. Plenty were understandably going to emigrate from Europe, but Israel made them very unwelcome in the Arab world, too. It’s also another good example of how Israel couldn’t have been established without their allies, since the US/UK were the primary providers of air travel for Jews seeking refuge from Arab states to Israel.
I find it very difficult to justify most historical claims of anticipatory self-defense - it usually looks to me that it’s an aggressor using an excuse to justify their aggression. I haven’t seen nearly enough evidence to suggest Israel wasn’t the aggressor in the Six Day War. While the military mobilization of their neighbors certainly contributed toward Israel’s mobilization, that alone isn’t justification for invasion. Nasser thought Israel was preparing to invade Syria, but he didn’t preemptively invade Israel, he lined up his troops on the Israel-Egypt border and waited. We know now that Israel was not mobilizing troops on Syria’s border, but Nasser’s choice to defend his border was reasonable and nonviolent, even with false information.
But aside from that, I think it’s reasonable to suggest Israel would have attacked even had there been no mobilization of troops from the Arab states. We saw Israel attack Egypt during the Suez Crisis where they forcibly re-opened passage through the Straits of Tiran, their only shipping route to the south other than the also-Egyptian Suez Canal. Just prior to the Six Day War, Egypt cut off Israel from the Straits of Tiran again, something Israel publicly called an act of war. It’s not a coincidence Israel went ahead and took Sinai (immediately adjacent to the Straits of Tiran) during this war and didn’t give it back until the Camp David Accords. (It’s worth noting that had Nasser not gotten the original false information, he wouldn’t have done any of this, and it’s entirely possible the entire thing would have been averted. But he did, and that was a huge blunder on his part. Still, I disagree with Israel that refusing them passage through shipping routes is an act of war.)
I would also suggest that Israel’s behavior after the Six Day War doesn’t seem like the actions of a country that was acting in self-defense. They conquered land during that war and continue to occupy most of it to this day. They’ve invaded other countries since, with stated reasons that are as believable as the United States’ reasons for invading Iraq. They’ve continued to occupy additional land. These actions indicate a country interested in expansionism and power growth, not peaceful co-existence.
I’m actually okay with that not being included as a critical point in Israeli history. My understanding is it was one piece in a long line of antisemitism, and while it was known by the Nazi party, it was known by the leadership to be fictional and wasn’t used seriously as propaganda by them. That’s not to say it didn’t have any effect, just that I’m not convinced it made much difference when it comes to the creation of Israel as a state.
I’m open to alternative viewpoints if you want to provide evidence or just offer some book titles that might change my mind.
I think this might be a semantic argument - it’s not important to me if we use the words “give” or “create.” Happy to use whatever words you prefer for allies having power and control of an area and ensuring that power and control is transferred to their chosen ally.
British Mandatory Palestine was officially ending May 15, 1948. Israel announced its independence on May 14, 1948. The United States officially recognized Israel as a state 11 minutes after it declared itself a sovereign state. It’s strange to suggest these are coincidences rather than planned action with their allies, but there’s plenty of evidence in addition to this to make it very clear that Israel wouldn’t have stood a chance without the backing of their superpower friends.
I think there’s a lot of fuzzyness around the idea of “born from that land.” It’s not like they sprouted out of the earth. As with just about any people, there was a lot of rape and murder of warring tribes until some combination of them stopped doing as much rape and as much murder and somewhat arbitrarily called themselves “one people.” If you want to call that “born from that land,” sure, but their ancestry goes back further than that. We’re all just apes.
does your timeline show that the Jews were systematically oppressed and dislocated from their home land for about 2400 years?
That’s one interpretation, though I’d disagree with it. I have Jewish heritage - enough that a significant portion of my ancestry was wiped out in the Holocaust, though obviously a few of them were lucky and escaped to the US with the help of a sponsor. I don’t practice Judaism as a religion and don’t really relate much to any of my heritage. Is Israel my homeland? Not at all. The United States is my homeland. Before that, Germany would be my homeland. Before that… well, I’m not sure, but history would suggest it’s highly unlikely it was Israel. I have zero attachment to that land, much like I expect you have zero attachment to the land of your ancestors from millennia ago. (I also have zero attachment to the land of my non-Jewish ancestry. I have no idea what it is from thousands of years ago, but I wouldn’t care if I did.)
Would I and other Jewish people be justified in kicking out Germans, because they spent hundreds of years there? What about the Russians? Poles? The Jewish diaspora has gone all over the place and made just about everything their home. Why should they have claim to land that their great great great great great ancestors once conquered and stole from somebody else?
If so, wouldn’t that make it understandable why they’re so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home?
I would argue Israel wasn’t their home until they moved there over the last hundred or so years. Home isn’t where some of your family lived 3000 years ago. The individuals in question never lived there. Their parents never lived there. Their grandparents never lived there. None of these people had any idea what Israel was even like. Today, there are more Jewish people in the United States than there are in Israel, and they’re happy to call the United States home.
If we’re going to make the argument that people should be allowed to lay claim to land their ancestry owned 3000 years ago, we open up a lot of questions.
First, it’s worth noting that this is also the home of Palestinians. The origins of Palestinians are much less clear than the origins of Jewish people in large part because the Jews have been uniquely good at maintaining their culture, so we have a much better grasp on Jewish people throughout history than we do of Palestinians. But at its core, the fact is Palestinians haven’t ever lived anywhere else. This means they’re also “so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home.”
Second, to be consistent, we’d have to revert a lot of borders to ancient times. Does that mean we should all revert borders to what they were 3000 years ago? Why 3000? Why not 2000? 4000? Regardless, you’re uprooting a lot of people - and you’d have to provide a really good justification for that, and I don’t see it.
Third, even if we agreed the Jews have a right to this land and we should revert to their ancient borders and give them control, that doesn’t mean they have a right to attempt genocide on those living there. The moment they embarked on the Nakba, they should have lost their allies in their mission. Assuming they have a right to the land, they have to humanely displace the people there, ensure they have a new place to live, and give them adequate compensation for the land and the massive inconvenience you’ve caused by uprooting their entire lives. Sort of a “sorry we’re doing this, but we’re trying to make it right.” Instead, they’ve killed millions of people over the decades.
True, but that’s not new. George Floyd, Occupy Wall Street, Seattle WTO, and the entirety of the civil rights movement all were met with state violence. The more they crack down, the more necessary it is to protest it.