this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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I fucking despise Biden for his policy in Palestine. If there was any reasonable chance that they could switch candidates now and still have a shot, I'd totally agree with you.
I think he's way too old to be president, but I'm sorry to say you're stuck with a shit decision, and one that's been engineered to help work against our best interests.
I fully get where you're coming from, but I'm not trying to gaslight you.
I'm not an American and even I know it is not his policy. It is a result of decades of US-Israel relationships with all kinds of ties between the two countries and has far too many stakeholders than just the head of the state.
Not even Bernie could've managed to navigate this shit situation properly.
Bernie would've led Bibi by the fucking nose. He'd have recalled his days in the kibbutz and said that Bibi is burning everything good about Israel.
Perhaps. I wish that were the reality we lived in. I also wish Gore won over Bush and we nipped Global warming in the bud. Alas...
He did win, and then SCOTUS declared the loser of the election POTUS in one of the most catastrophic decisions of any in the history of the world, given the later consequences.
sorry but bernie is a zionist too
He is, but he's not the type that would kowtow to and enable fascists or fund genocide.
But thats what being a zionist is, you cant be a zionist without supporting the IDF which has been engaged in the constant subjugation and extermination whenever politically possible for decades now.
The president isn't a king. Bernie would've had lot of resistance from within the government, military, and intelligence agencies.
Deep state isn't just a conservative meme/boogeyman. It definitely exists.
Enough with that ridiculous excuse every time Biden refuses to do things that ARE within his power!
He bypassed Congress by sending many smaller weapons shipments to Israel so that he didn't need congressional approval and when he halted shipment of 2000lb bombs only, he could have halted shipment of ALL weapons but chose not to.
Furthermore, knowing what they do with them, supplying the fascist apartheid regime of Israel is against both international and US law.
He's enough of a "king" to keep committing crimes against humanity, but apparently NOT actively breaking the law is outside the bounds of his power 🙄
I don't know... I see what you're saying, but does the president not have the power to take a principled stance on the matter? Maybe I'm being too naïve about what's realistically possible, but ultimately intended policy decisions have to start at the mouth of the nation's leader.
He needs to firmly acknowledge and denounce the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
Can someone remind me of the last time a U.S. president took a principled stand on some foreign policy issue? Seriously, I'm not just asking this to be a dick. I'm pretty sure things are set up to ensure this does not ever happen.
Biden pulling out of Afghanistan.
Obama pulled out of Iraq.
Biden pulled out of Afghanistan.
Shit, my bad, I did a stupid
I mean, he certainly did say that he wants to increases taxes on the ultra-wealthy.
It's not a foreign policy issue, but it's one that would be unpopular with any rich donors so it perhaps demonstrates some amount of integrity.
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to defend the US. Their foreign policy is stinkier than blue cheese.
And doesn't even compensate by also being delicious, like the cheese does!
Unless you have a significant profit stake in the military industrial complex and/or the fossil fuel industries, of course. Then it's the most delicious thing ever.
Biden has publicly criticized Russia and China before. Every US President has made statements against countries like North Korea or Iran. It's the literally the least he could do.
Those are things that are in the interest of the US foreign policy agenda.
Sure, but didn’t Biden go on a rant of how pro-Israel he is specifically?
He did, and I'm not trying to downplay that in any way. He also called for peace, though, whereas Trump said he was also pro-Israel but thought Israel should finish what they started.
Yeah it is. Obama said about the Cuban Embargo that "these 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked", so he changed longstanding policy.
Meanwhile, letting Israel do whatever the fuck they want to Palestinians for 75 years hasn't made the treatment more just (duh) or the region more stable and peaceful, and the majority of the population realizes that now.
People are demanding of Biden and the rest of the Dem leadership, which are the people with the power to do so, to change the awful status quo of total deference to a fascist apartheid regime and Biden et al are risking the election and thus American democracy by refusing to listen to the people who they are supposed to represent.
An embargo on a small island nation has nothing in common with a key strategic ally in the middle east. Why are we comparing these two? Are you for real now
It has one thing in common and that's the thing I was referring to:
In both cases, the president has the power to change bad policy, no matter how longstanding.
Obama chose to make the right choice under little to no pressure (except from people adamant that he should do the opposite) while Biden is insisting on the wrong choice in spite of intense pressure and a very significant risk that it'll cost him the election.
The specifics of Cuba has nothing to do with it.
You're not addressing the central point of my claim and simply restating your initial statement: that the president can change policy
while ignoring the key difference between Cuba and Israel. They are completely dissimilar situations with vastly different implications. The progressive left --which cares so much about genocide suddenly (forget Yemen, Syria, where more people have died int he last 6 years by an order of 10 than the entire palestine-israel conflict in the last 100 years)-- made up their mind about Biden long before Oct 7. The only way for Joe to pander to their vote is by accomplishing miracles at this point and I think that ship has sailed a long time ago so I really doubt they are the key demographic that will cost him his election.
Nice whataboutism strawman combo but that's false. The left are the ONLY ones who have consistently criticized BOTH major parties for atrocities committed in Yemen, Syria and elsewhere.
Besides, Palestine and Israel is an area the size of New Jersey with roughly one and a half times the population where only one party even has a military and the other is confined to areas under its complete control, so your comparison to ACTUAL wars is absolutely ludicrous.
Also false. The people who voted for him in 2020 were in large part still with him.
No longer actively choosing to allow war crimes and even committing some yourself in support is not a miracle and it sure as hell isn't PANDERING! What the fuck is wrong with you??
Yeah, he can easily afford to lose Michigan, home of the largest Muslim population in the country.. Oh, wait! He fucking can't!
Besides, he only beat Trump very narrowly the first time around, boosted by good voter turnout as the left was actively experiencing how awful a Trump presidency was and hoped that Biden could be influenced to shift further left on key issues.
Now that those hopes have been mostly dashed, it's EXTRA important that he doesn't further alienate the left. Which he's doing.
The way things are now, most polls have the Mango Mussolini winning and in both previous elections he's OVERPERFORMED compared to the polls.
Just to circle back, because you keep side-stepping it: Cuba is not equivalent to Israel. In any form or manner. That's what started this conversation.
If you followed any of the left pundits, news outlets, and even social media (including Lemmy) before Oct 7 you would know that Joe was long dead in the water to this demographic. You can latch on to Israel/Palestine as a defining moment for this election but honestly if it wasn't for this, this group would have found something else to latch on to. Joe may very well lose this election, but it won't be because of the progressive left by any shot as demonstrated by who is actually showing up tot he polls (even if pivot states such as Mi with large muslim populations exist).
I never said that they are. I in fact specifically answered your question/assertion by saying so. That's not side stepping, that's accurately and honestly addressing your whataboutism.
No, that's the irrelevant direction in which YOU are trying to hijack the conversation.
I did and that's simply not true. I think you're letting your bias confuse you into thinking that any criticism equals total condemnation and disownment. It doesn't.
Typical apologist tactic: rather than address the issue, claim that the others are just PRETENDING to care about the brutal slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent civilians with American weapons to have something to criticize Biden for 🤦
Guess what: we DO care, and the fact that you're more interested in deflecting to your conspiracy theory that the left just wants Biden to fail no matter what shows that YOU don't care enough about Palestinian lives and know nothing about the left outside of your own cynical caricatures.
Is it possible to have a conversation without morally loading every statement or are you here for the virtue signalling? I don't think I've attacked you personally in any of my posts, have I?
I think it's time to close Lemmy for the day. Cheers.
When that conversation is about genocide and the enabling of such? Hopefully not.
Not directly, but accusing everyone on the left of not really caring about the genocide and instead just using it as a pretense to attack Biden for the sake of attacking Biden IS indirectly calling me a cynical liar.
Sure, just mount your imaginary High Road High Horse and ride away when you don't have an answer to legitimate criticism of your dismissive rhetoric, baseless accusations, and obvious deflection 🙄
I'm a progressive leftie and care about genocide too but it's not a magic shield that suddenly grants all my arguments immunity from criticism and also imposes on me the justification to insult everyone that disagrees with me personally. That's just called being a dick.
Suuure you are! All that talk about the left in third person and automatic defending of the conservative neoliberal Biden was just something I imagined! 🙄
Holy gigantic strawman, Batman!
You can criticize my arguments all you want, but if you're not only wrong but also arguing from a place of insulting and belittling prejudice and reflexive apologia, then you should expect to be criticized right back and yes, insulted for your obviously bad takes.
I may or may not have been right about you not really caring about the genocide, but the fact is that you're acting like it by pretending that Biden's willing participation in it is a non-issue and that anyone who criticizes him for that has an ulterior motive of "just not liking him no matter what" or whatever you imagine to silence that nagging "could I be wrong about Biden?" voice in the back of your mind.
I want lefties to be politically effective, but right now all we care about is empty rhetoric. You're the prime example of that. Instead of being concerned with engaging and constructing good arguments, you spent half the time criticizing my motivations. Because that's all we are amounting right now is living up to the meme of 'hot' air and no substance. So we come with asinine statements like:
and the moment someone points how stupid this is you went straight to
WHY YOU LOVE GENOCIDE??!????!!!
We gotta do better (and i don't care if this sounds like tone policing). I'm sick of the fake moral indignation. I want people to start thinking about being politically effective and actually changing the discourse towards what can be accomplished.
In what world is "stop providing weapons and political cover for a genocide" empty rhetoric?? Do you think reasonable demands automatically become unreasonable or "empty" if the recipient is stubborn enough? Or are you arguing either in bad faith or with very little thought?
First you claim that I and everyone else on the left only have empty rhetoric and then you complain that I don't construct more versions of an argument that's self-evident. Pick a lane to be wrong in, please.
As for your motivations, the only reasons why I ever touched on them was to try and make sense of why you'd ever make such nonsensical arguments in spite of seemingly being capable of reason.
Besides, you complain a lot about me having the audacity to question your motivations after yourself claiming that everyone on the left only criticizes the US participation in the ongoing genocide to dunk on Biden 🙄
No need to refer to yourself in the third person. You're sounding plenty pompous and self-important already.
Biden should just pause Israel because Obama was able to reverse Cuba
Another ridiculous strawman. I never said anything resembling that and you know it.
Again, I did not. Do you want me to leave you and your army of strawman alone so you can have your argument without me interrupting?
Nah, Neoliberals like you and Biden DO love yourselves some policing..
There you go accusing me of faking it again. That's still false and also hugely hypocritical given how much you're complaining about ME questioning YOUR motivations 🤦
And I want apparatchiks like yourself to stop pretending that everything that your Dear Leader actively chooses not to do is automatically impossible.
Giving up on your principles the moment the authority figures from your "team" resist isn't being effective. It's being needlessly submissive and demanding that others follow your meek example is authoritarian bullshit.
more vacuous shit:
are you a highschooler? Because that would explain a lot....
Again with the Alex Jones style out of context quoting bullshit. Go yell about gay frogs if you want to imitate that fundamentally dishonest blowhard.
here is an example of your empty rhetoric:
give me a fucking break.
Those are all taken out of context and make perfect sense WITH context. This is Faux News level distortion if not downright Alex Jones lunacy 🙄
no. its just you morally loading every statement so that you can grandstand. And you do it in almost every thread I've seen you in. Try, as an exercise, to sometime engage with someone's arguments (just one time) without invoking any pejorative or dramatic virtuous invocations. You might find a new world is waiting for you- a wold where dialog can flow and thoughts can be exchanged. I'll be waiting for you there when you're ready.
Nope. I sometimes use grand words for accuracy or emphasis, but never disingenuously like you're doing right now. Grandstanding is EMPTY posturing, not emphatically saying true and important things.
Since you obviously don't know the difference, here's a short primer:
When a Republican says that they're being silenced by the government during a prime time TV appearance to promote their new book, that's grandstanding.
When a progressive who doesn't take corporate PAC money emphatically says that billionaires and their corporations have too much power over society, that's not grandstanding.
Do you understand it now or do you need me to find a video explaining it with puppets?
I do that every time. I only get snide and sarcastic about it once it's clear that the other person is not engaging in good faith and/or ignoring something I already explained because it doesn't fit their narrative.
And there's some more of that hypocrisy from the same person who excused ME of grandstanding just a few sentences earlier 🤦
Are you SURE you're not a Republican? Even the worst neoliberals usually aren't THAT blatantly hypocritical..
I'm not the one constantly loading every phrase with all the virtuous condemnation diarrhea because I can actually engage with arguments without attacking the character of the author.
Attack the idea-not the people.
That would have been a LOT easier to take seriously if it hadn't been appended to a comment consisting entirely of baseless personal attacks 😂
Also, at no point did I fucking defend Biden. I just called out your stupid analogy about Cuba. Seems like you just had all the insults ready to deploy and were never interested in the argument.
Saying that the awful things he does by choice is actually necessary things that he doesn't like doing and would stop if he could IS defending him.
As is repeatedly trying to deflect to a completely different topic.
Let me bend it in neon for you one last time:
My analogy was NOT about Cuba. It was about the fact that presidents have the power to change longstanding foreign policy, contrary to what the person I was replying to was implying.
Secondarily (that means later and less importantly), it was a comparison of one president who sometimes had the guts to go against tradition and the will of rich and powerful pressure groups and one who doesn't.
Thank goodness it wasn't my argument.
correct. And my response was...? Let me restate it because maybe it wasn't clear:
What a president can do and what a president ought to do in changing policy are two different things and bringing up the fact that change was able to occur in a place with low stakes (cuba: very low stakes) is not equivalent to the policy change that needs to occur in Israel (very high stakes). It's not apples to apples, is it?
It's come to the point where the risk of changing the candidate has to be weighed against the risk of not changing the candidate.
And it has been. The risk of sticking with Biden is the greater one by far. He's losing the election and showing no willingness to change any of the behaviors that are causing it.
Switching to another candidate might be a controversial choice, but it's still a safer bet than Biden.
Na. It's a pretty clear and easy decision. Neither option gonna get ya what you want and need, but one option is actively trying for a disastrous result.
Unfortunately, too many people in the USA say the same thing and mean the opposite candidate.