Trump's latest idea has renewed Democratic criticism of pro-Palestinian activists who encouraged voters not to back Biden or Harris in the presidential election.
Blame can be shared. We can blame Biden for continuing half a century of support for genocide as long as it’s a close US ally that’s doing it. We can blame the media for creating an environment where more Americans support Israel than Palestine, in one of the most morally unambiguous situations that has ever existed on the planet. We can also blame short-sighted political operatives who were unmoved by warnings that their efforts to “help” in Gaza by advocating against Democrats in this election were going to accelerate the genocide tenfold, if they accomplished anything at all. Now that the warnings are working out precisely as envisioned, I have very little sympathy for “Arabs for Trump” or anything resembling it.
I’m actually not sure how much we can blame Harris, since she was handed a totally impossible situation where attempting to change course on Gaza would have lost her significant support from Israel-supporters, and I strongly suspect gained her pretty minimal support from Palestinian supporters. We may disagree about that. But regardless, I think the pretty reasonable claim “the Democrats have their heads up their ass as far as Gaza” is in no way a counter argument for the claim “and the uncommitted movement was, in retrospect, a big mistake.”
attempting to change course on Gaza would have lost her significant support from Israel-supporters, and I strongly suspect gained her pretty minimal support from Palestinian supporters.
this is inadvertently a perfect summation of the problem.
you’re framing “what position should Harris have taken on genocide in Gaza” entirely in terms of would it have gained or lost her voters.
a 1938 poll asked people in the US if they supported allowing more European Jews to move to the US. 71% said no. advance that page by two slides, a 1942 poll found 93% of Americans supported internment of Japanese immigrants, and 59% supported internment of American citizens with Japanese ancestry.
opposition to genocide…is sometimes politically unpopular.
have you seen the first episode of Black Mirror, the one where the British PM gets blackmailed into fucking a pig? there’s a somewhat-minor plot point in it, that I think got overshadowed by the rest of it. the PM is getting the results of real-time polls on Twitter, and based on the poll results he’s constantly flip-flopping about whether or not he’ll fuck the pig.
Republicans have principles. they’re all bad principles, to be sure, but there are things they consistently believe in. Democrats have no principles. they’ll campaign on anything they think will get them votes.
Biden took the biggest action on climate change ten times over, and reduced income inequality for the first time in I have no idea how long. Neither of them were even close to being enough to fully reverse 50 years of fuckery, or even make much more than a sizeable dent in the problem, but they were big swings at pretty much the two biggest problems in America today, which came with quite a bit of success starting from a near-apocalyptic position. Because the media and the Democratic campaign apparatus are equally total shit, no one knows that either of those things happened. Biden focused a lot more on getting them done than on publicizing them, or working on much more visible problems like the price of eggs.
If you ask certain people, they will tell you something along the lines of “well, I didn’t hear about that, and it’s the Democrats’ job to earn my vote.”
Federal data show the Biden administration approved 6,430 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years, outpacing the Trump administration’s 6,172 drilling-permit approvals in its first two years.
The Biden administration cleared the way on Wednesday for a controversial Arctic oil project, recommending that drilling proceed in an undeveloped section of the Alaskan tundra.
While the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, suggested that the project move forward with a more limited footprint, the changes would still allow ConocoPhillips, the company behind the development, to extract the full volume of oil it is targeting.
In a sit-down interview with CNN on Thursday, Vice President Harris said she wouldn’t ban fracking if elected president, a reversal of her position during her first presidential run.
The Democratic nominee attempted to explain why her position has changed from being against fracking to being in favor of it.
like I said, climate change is a complete non-sequitur from the conversation we were having - but if you look at it beyond a surface level, it still underscores the point I was trying to make. Democrats’ opposition to climate change isn’t based on principles, it’s based on “say whatever we need to say to get elected”.
and reduced income inequality for the first time in I have no idea how long
sigh. sure, let’s play this game of non-sequiturs.
Using pretax money income, the Gini index decreased by 1.2% between 2021 and 2022 (from 0.494 to 0.488). This annual change was the first time the Gini index had decreased since 2007, reversing the 1.2% increase between 2020 and 2021
which sounds great, until you scroll down…
In contrast to the 1.2% decrease in the Gini index calculated using pretax income, the annual change in the Gini index calculated using post-tax income increased 3.2% from 2021 to 2022.
so yeah, income inequality decreased…if you use a statistic that doesn’t matter in the real world (income before taxes). but inequality increased if you use a statistic that reflects actual people’s actual pocketbooks (post-tax income).
and even using the misleading pre-tax figures, the supposed decrease in inequality was from high incomes decreasing slightly, while low incomes stayed the same:
The 2022 data suggest that declines in real income at the middle and top of the income distribution drove the decrease in the Gini index.
At the 90th percentile, 10% of households in 2022 had income above $216,000, down 5.5% from the 2021 estimate of $228,600.
However, at the 10th percentile, 10% of households had income at or below $17,100 in 2022, not statistically different from 2021 ($16,890).
so Biden gets a talking point about how he reduced income inequality…but for actual low-income people, nothing materially improves. again, this underscores the point I was making. Democrats don’t have “help poor people” as a principle, they just want to get votes based on a perception that they help the poor.
if a campaign had a principled stance of improving material conditions for poor people, then it probably wouldn’t do things like have Uber’s Chief Legal Officer as a campaign advisor. but I’m just a random guy on the internet and not a Democratic campaign strategist, so what do I know.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, and I also do not primarily blame Harris. If you look at my post and comment history, you’ll see that I was backing her since the second Biden dropped.
She did make missteps wrt Gaza, but I think in retrospect it was probably too late for her by then anyways, given how long Biden stayed in, and how much damage he did.
The uncommitted movement was during state primaries, it wasn’t supposed to be during the general as well. I think that it was coopted (or at least boosted) later on by right-wingers and Zionists to expressely hurt Dems, rather than just oppose their stance on Gaza.
At an individual level, I don’t blame anyone who is Arab and could not bring themselves to vote for the party who was, even during the election, supplying weapons to kill their fellow countrymen and neighbors. I have a friend who is Palestinian, and he told me that he saw a clip in the background of a report on the “war” on CNN of a building being bombed, and it was an apartment building where one of his friends used to live. Just casually being demo’d on TV.
Now, Arabs voting for Trump is another matter entirely, and there is and never was any excuse for that.
Yeah. I pretty much agree with 100% of what you just said and I’ve been echoing some of the particulars of it for the last couple of days (in particular, as much as I think “uncommitted” after the primary was a mistake, I get it). I’ve also had that experience of watching TV with someone who was watching homes get destroyed in a place that they knew personally. It’s not a great experience.
Interesting.
Blame can be shared. We can blame Biden for continuing half a century of support for genocide as long as it’s a close US ally that’s doing it. We can blame the media for creating an environment where more Americans support Israel than Palestine, in one of the most morally unambiguous situations that has ever existed on the planet. We can also blame short-sighted political operatives who were unmoved by warnings that their efforts to “help” in Gaza by advocating against Democrats in this election were going to accelerate the genocide tenfold, if they accomplished anything at all. Now that the warnings are working out precisely as envisioned, I have very little sympathy for “Arabs for Trump” or anything resembling it.
I’m actually not sure how much we can blame Harris, since she was handed a totally impossible situation where attempting to change course on Gaza would have lost her significant support from Israel-supporters, and I strongly suspect gained her pretty minimal support from Palestinian supporters. We may disagree about that. But regardless, I think the pretty reasonable claim “the Democrats have their heads up their ass as far as Gaza” is in no way a counter argument for the claim “and the uncommitted movement was, in retrospect, a big mistake.”
this is inadvertently a perfect summation of the problem.
you’re framing “what position should Harris have taken on genocide in Gaza” entirely in terms of would it have gained or lost her voters.
a 1938 poll asked people in the US if they supported allowing more European Jews to move to the US. 71% said no. advance that page by two slides, a 1942 poll found 93% of Americans supported internment of Japanese immigrants, and 59% supported internment of American citizens with Japanese ancestry.
opposition to genocide…is sometimes politically unpopular.
have you seen the first episode of Black Mirror, the one where the British PM gets blackmailed into fucking a pig? there’s a somewhat-minor plot point in it, that I think got overshadowed by the rest of it. the PM is getting the results of real-time polls on Twitter, and based on the poll results he’s constantly flip-flopping about whether or not he’ll fuck the pig.
Republicans have principles. they’re all bad principles, to be sure, but there are things they consistently believe in. Democrats have no principles. they’ll campaign on anything they think will get them votes.
Republicans are anti-abortion. Democrats are pro-choice…except when they campaign for anti-abortion Democrats
Republicans are anti-immigrant. Democrats are pro-immigrant…except when they try to campaign on “border security” out of a misplaced belief that they’ll win over “moderate” xenophobes"
Republicans are in favor of big business fucking over regular people. Democrats defend regular people…except when someone like FTC Chair Lina Khan goes after businesses connected with Democratic party donors
Biden took the biggest action on climate change ten times over, and reduced income inequality for the first time in I have no idea how long. Neither of them were even close to being enough to fully reverse 50 years of fuckery, or even make much more than a sizeable dent in the problem, but they were big swings at pretty much the two biggest problems in America today, which came with quite a bit of success starting from a near-apocalyptic position. Because the media and the Democratic campaign apparatus are equally total shit, no one knows that either of those things happened. Biden focused a lot more on getting them done than on publicizing them, or working on much more visible problems like the price of eggs.
If you ask certain people, they will tell you something along the lines of “well, I didn’t hear about that, and it’s the Democrats’ job to earn my vote.”
oh wow, are we at the “bringing up non-sequitur talking points” point of this debate already?
Jan 2023:
Feb 2023:
August 2024:
like I said, climate change is a complete non-sequitur from the conversation we were having - but if you look at it beyond a surface level, it still underscores the point I was trying to make. Democrats’ opposition to climate change isn’t based on principles, it’s based on “say whatever we need to say to get elected”.
sigh. sure, let’s play this game of non-sequiturs.
from the Census’s own website:
which sounds great, until you scroll down…
so yeah, income inequality decreased…if you use a statistic that doesn’t matter in the real world (income before taxes). but inequality increased if you use a statistic that reflects actual people’s actual pocketbooks (post-tax income).
and even using the misleading pre-tax figures, the supposed decrease in inequality was from high incomes decreasing slightly, while low incomes stayed the same:
so Biden gets a talking point about how he reduced income inequality…but for actual low-income people, nothing materially improves. again, this underscores the point I was making. Democrats don’t have “help poor people” as a principle, they just want to get votes based on a perception that they help the poor.
if a campaign had a principled stance of improving material conditions for poor people, then it probably wouldn’t do things like have Uber’s Chief Legal Officer as a campaign advisor. but I’m just a random guy on the internet and not a Democratic campaign strategist, so what do I know.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, and I also do not primarily blame Harris. If you look at my post and comment history, you’ll see that I was backing her since the second Biden dropped.
She did make missteps wrt Gaza, but I think in retrospect it was probably too late for her by then anyways, given how long Biden stayed in, and how much damage he did.
The uncommitted movement was during state primaries, it wasn’t supposed to be during the general as well. I think that it was coopted (or at least boosted) later on by right-wingers and Zionists to expressely hurt Dems, rather than just oppose their stance on Gaza.
At an individual level, I don’t blame anyone who is Arab and could not bring themselves to vote for the party who was, even during the election, supplying weapons to kill their fellow countrymen and neighbors. I have a friend who is Palestinian, and he told me that he saw a clip in the background of a report on the “war” on CNN of a building being bombed, and it was an apartment building where one of his friends used to live. Just casually being demo’d on TV.
Now, Arabs voting for Trump is another matter entirely, and there is and never was any excuse for that.
Yeah. I pretty much agree with 100% of what you just said and I’ve been echoing some of the particulars of it for the last couple of days (in particular, as much as I think “uncommitted” after the primary was a mistake, I get it). I’ve also had that experience of watching TV with someone who was watching homes get destroyed in a place that they knew personally. It’s not a great experience.