President-elect Donald Trump’s promise could lead to a 60-day cease-fire, allowing Israel to suspend hostilities until military support resumes under the new administration.
But it means your vote could have helped bring the victory to someone less genocidal.
I know Harris is not a pro-Palestine person, but she’s someone we could have talked to and could have felt the pressure of her voters. At the very least she doesn’t support the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, unlike Trump, who couldn’t give less of a shit about Palestinians and is happy if Israel leveled them down
P.S. I don’t want to make you feel guilty. The political system the US people live in is a shit. I’m just disappointed that maybe she could have had a chance of winning if people didn’t abstain.
she’s someone we could have talked to and could have felt the pressure of her voters.
No, she absolutely isn’t.
Politicians are never more receptive to voters’ concerns than just before an election. Once they have people’s votes, they tend to shift further in the direction of interests groups and the establishment. Like, for example, on the campaign trail, Obama promised to end mass surveillance and protect whistleblowers, but once he was in office, he did the opposite. Harris on the campaign trail, after the widespread campus protests, was the most pro-Palestine she would ever be, which is to say not even the slightest bit and completely unconditionally supportive of material aid to Israel.
It used to be that politicians would promise to do good things on the campaign trail, and then usually not follow through. But now they don’t even have to promise anything, because people will just project whatever views and values they hold onto whichever candidate they like regardless of anything they say or do.
Harris and Biden are unconditionally supportive of everything Israel does. Short of direct involvement of the US military, it’s not really possible for Trump to be meaningfully worse than that.
Right, I don’t deny that Harris was less evil on other issues, but I do not subscribe to the ideology of lesser-evilism. Just because one side is more evil doesn’t mean that the other side is worth supporting when they’re both irredeemably evil genocidal psychopaths who deserve eternal torture in the deepest circle of hell. Lesser-evilism doesn’t make sense from either a moral or strategic standpoint.
There’s a social experiment that’s been studied where the researchers give two people $100 to split, but the first person makes one offer on how to split it, and if the second person doesn’t agree, then neither of them get anything. If lesser-evilism was correct, then what would happen is that the first person would offer a $99-$1 split and the second person would accept, because $1 is a lesser evil than $0. But that’s not what actually happens. The reality is that most people have a certain minimum threshold, somewhere around $70-$30, and below that they’ll tell the other person to get fucked.
This is not really an irrational behavior, though it may appear so in the context of the experiment. For example, if the experiment were repeated multiple times with the same participants, than accepting the $1 means that you will only ever be offered $1 in future negotiations because you’ve shown you’ll accept it.
In reality, I’m pretty sure that lesser-evilists understand this concept on some level. It’s just that either their minimum threshold does not preclude the genocide of foreigners in far away countries, or they convince themselves that the democrats aren’t actually as bad about that as they are. But for me, I do recognize that Harris is a complete monster, and I also place value on Palestinian lives, so I said no to the $99-$1 offer and now I have $0 which I fully anticipated and have no regrets over. Maybe next time they’ll come back with a reasonable offer that doesn’t include genocide.
What pisses me off is you don’t even understand the place of privilege from which you speak. It’s such disgusting selfish egotistical mentality to think that if a candidate doesn’t represent your exact desires, that you think you can wash your hands of the whole thing and absolve yourself your part in the system.
The world is not designed to cater to your personal sensibilities.
Meanwhile, as you abstain and wait literally forever for a candidate that you don’t have to pinch your nose to vote for, you are proudly throwing away your ability to impact change for the better.
Basically you’re saying if you can’t have ice cream for dinner then we should go ahead and burn down the grocery store.
I fully understand why you see it that way. To you, Palestinians do not register as human beings, and so from your perspective I’m throwing a fit because my parents won’t rescue a puppy, or perhaps buy me a new doll. Only through the complete othering and dehumanization of foreigners is it possible for you to describe opposition to genocide as a “personal sensibility” or my “exact desires” or compare it to throwing a fit because I don’t get ice cream. You people are constantly telling on yourself that you do not recognize people born on the other side of an imaginary line with the wrong skin color as human beings. You don’t see it as being about them, rather you think this is all about my feelings, about “oh no I saw something on TV that made me feel sad, somebody do something about my feelings,” because you are unable to recognize them as human, and that is how you are able to absurdly call it “selfish” and “egotistical” for me to care about them.
If it’s truely the case that my only option within the system is to vote in favor of genocide, then yes, obviously, “burning down the grocery store” would be an extremely reasonable and proportionate response to that situation, you know, like, if the grocery store was actively butchering up human beings and serving their meat in the deli aisle. But since these people have the same moral worth to you as animals, that’s why to you it seems like burning down a grocery store just because they serve beef.
What’s incredible about this though is that you have the audacity and lack of self awareness to describe my position as the privileged one. As if you don’t get to live your whole life safely behind the walls of the garden, beyond which people are getting massacred in your name, but which you have the ability to simply ignore and shut out, out of sight and out of mind. You and I have the privilege of being born in a first world country, but I have my perspective precisely because I have had the misfortune of getting a glimpse of what things are like beyond that wall, and recognizing from that that the status quo cannot continue.
Whether for good or ill and whether sooner or later, the wall is coming down. Someday you’ll get a taste of the horrors beyond, of your own medicine that you’ve been dishing out, and the karma of your actions will find it’s way back home to you.
Harris and Biden are unconditionally supportive of everything Israel does. Short of direct involvement of the US military, it’s not really possible for Trump to be meaningfully worse than that.
Remind me of this genocide-downplaying take in three months or so, please.
But it means your vote could have helped bring the victory to someone less genocidal.
I know Harris is not a pro-Palestine person, but she’s someone we could have talked to and could have felt the pressure of her voters. At the very least she doesn’t support the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, unlike Trump, who couldn’t give less of a shit about Palestinians and is happy if Israel leveled them down
P.S. I don’t want to make you feel guilty. The political system the US people live in is a shit. I’m just disappointed that maybe she could have had a chance of winning if people didn’t abstain.
No, she absolutely isn’t.
Politicians are never more receptive to voters’ concerns than just before an election. Once they have people’s votes, they tend to shift further in the direction of interests groups and the establishment. Like, for example, on the campaign trail, Obama promised to end mass surveillance and protect whistleblowers, but once he was in office, he did the opposite. Harris on the campaign trail, after the widespread campus protests, was the most pro-Palestine she would ever be, which is to say not even the slightest bit and completely unconditionally supportive of material aid to Israel.
It used to be that politicians would promise to do good things on the campaign trail, and then usually not follow through. But now they don’t even have to promise anything, because people will just project whatever views and values they hold onto whichever candidate they like regardless of anything they say or do.
Harris and Biden are unconditionally supportive of everything Israel does. Short of direct involvement of the US military, it’s not really possible for Trump to be meaningfully worse than that.
Okay I understand your point. Unfortunately Palestinians are not the only targeted ones. We have
Harris said and has showed to support them. Trump vowed to destroy all of them.
Right, I don’t deny that Harris was less evil on other issues, but I do not subscribe to the ideology of lesser-evilism. Just because one side is more evil doesn’t mean that the other side is worth supporting when they’re both irredeemably evil genocidal psychopaths who deserve eternal torture in the deepest circle of hell. Lesser-evilism doesn’t make sense from either a moral or strategic standpoint.
There’s a social experiment that’s been studied where the researchers give two people $100 to split, but the first person makes one offer on how to split it, and if the second person doesn’t agree, then neither of them get anything. If lesser-evilism was correct, then what would happen is that the first person would offer a $99-$1 split and the second person would accept, because $1 is a lesser evil than $0. But that’s not what actually happens. The reality is that most people have a certain minimum threshold, somewhere around $70-$30, and below that they’ll tell the other person to get fucked.
This is not really an irrational behavior, though it may appear so in the context of the experiment. For example, if the experiment were repeated multiple times with the same participants, than accepting the $1 means that you will only ever be offered $1 in future negotiations because you’ve shown you’ll accept it.
In reality, I’m pretty sure that lesser-evilists understand this concept on some level. It’s just that either their minimum threshold does not preclude the genocide of foreigners in far away countries, or they convince themselves that the democrats aren’t actually as bad about that as they are. But for me, I do recognize that Harris is a complete monster, and I also place value on Palestinian lives, so I said no to the $99-$1 offer and now I have $0 which I fully anticipated and have no regrets over. Maybe next time they’ll come back with a reasonable offer that doesn’t include genocide.
Yeah, fuck the lives of American minorities, you have to make yourself feel good when you’re in the voting booth! 😊
What pisses me off is you don’t even understand the place of privilege from which you speak. It’s such disgusting selfish egotistical mentality to think that if a candidate doesn’t represent your exact desires, that you think you can wash your hands of the whole thing and absolve yourself your part in the system.
The world is not designed to cater to your personal sensibilities.
Meanwhile, as you abstain and wait literally forever for a candidate that you don’t have to pinch your nose to vote for, you are proudly throwing away your ability to impact change for the better.
Basically you’re saying if you can’t have ice cream for dinner then we should go ahead and burn down the grocery store.
You’re a child.
I fully understand why you see it that way. To you, Palestinians do not register as human beings, and so from your perspective I’m throwing a fit because my parents won’t rescue a puppy, or perhaps buy me a new doll. Only through the complete othering and dehumanization of foreigners is it possible for you to describe opposition to genocide as a “personal sensibility” or my “exact desires” or compare it to throwing a fit because I don’t get ice cream. You people are constantly telling on yourself that you do not recognize people born on the other side of an imaginary line with the wrong skin color as human beings. You don’t see it as being about them, rather you think this is all about my feelings, about “oh no I saw something on TV that made me feel sad, somebody do something about my feelings,” because you are unable to recognize them as human, and that is how you are able to absurdly call it “selfish” and “egotistical” for me to care about them.
If it’s truely the case that my only option within the system is to vote in favor of genocide, then yes, obviously, “burning down the grocery store” would be an extremely reasonable and proportionate response to that situation, you know, like, if the grocery store was actively butchering up human beings and serving their meat in the deli aisle. But since these people have the same moral worth to you as animals, that’s why to you it seems like burning down a grocery store just because they serve beef.
What’s incredible about this though is that you have the audacity and lack of self awareness to describe my position as the privileged one. As if you don’t get to live your whole life safely behind the walls of the garden, beyond which people are getting massacred in your name, but which you have the ability to simply ignore and shut out, out of sight and out of mind. You and I have the privilege of being born in a first world country, but I have my perspective precisely because I have had the misfortune of getting a glimpse of what things are like beyond that wall, and recognizing from that that the status quo cannot continue.
Whether for good or ill and whether sooner or later, the wall is coming down. Someday you’ll get a taste of the horrors beyond, of your own medicine that you’ve been dishing out, and the karma of your actions will find it’s way back home to you.
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If “growing up” entails supporting genocide, then rest assured that I will never “grow up.”
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Remind me of this genocide-downplaying take in three months or so, please.