futatorius

His dithering, weak, incoherent performance in the debate? Or is that already forgotten?

Seriously, there's better eating on a pigeon, and they're easier to catch.

Wow, that's some deep thought, there, R D Laing. What if we're the crazy ones?

People close to me have schizophrenia. It's as much a disease as cancer is. If you don't believe that, you've never experienced it up close, or you have an inability to learn from direct experience.

He said “we are all culpable” not “I alone am culpable.”

And that's stupid binary thinking and he was wrong.

You are in no position to determine my degree of culpability, or that of anyone who's not pulling a trigger.

I'm encouraging others not to waste their lives, when they can accomplish far more by staying alive and engaging.

But if you want to torch yourself and refuse to get professional help, I can't stop you. Just don't encourage others to emulate your disordered thinking.

What, are you 16? Do you think this is some kind of life-changing insight?

Well, any act that actually accomplished something would be more effective than a futile gesture.

His goal was to die. Any benefit to the Palestinians was secondary, or more likely, an ad-hoc excuse.

Very few policies are determined by party platforms at election times. There were no pro-civil-rights-movement candidates from the major parties back in the 1960s either. Events drove them, and those events didn't just randomly happen. There were decades of organizing, recruiting, training, planning, and hard debate that went into them, and people laid their lives on the line in furtherance of actual goals, not empty gestures.

Similarly, neither major party opposed the Vietnam war, or either of the Iraq wars, or the invasion of Afghanistan, or gay rights. That's all just an excuse for inaction. Public opinion can be changed, even if it sometimes happens too late. But if you're not willing to get out in the streets, nothing will happen at all.

this totally isn’t just your excuse/rationalization for attacking someone actually willing to take action against genocide

Not speaking for them, but someone committing ineffectual self-destruction isn't something worthy of emulation.

Anyone who tacitly supports the genocide and doesn’t do everything in their power to bring an end to and oppose the genocide is culpable.

Nothing like a little binary thinking to capture the nuance of a situation.

Here's a thought exercise: if everyone here in the US who cared even an iota about stopping the genocide were to self-immolate, what difference would it make besides leaving a trail of bereaved people and a small contribution to making climate change even worse? Do you honestly believe that, even if hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans set themselves on fire, the ethno-chauvinist goons in the Likud would give a shit, or American public opinion would be swayed even slightly from its lethargic apathy? Only organizing, engaging in the political process and continuing to publicize the situation, along with BDS, will make any difference. The rest is displacement activity that, at most, will make you feel good about your own righteousness, but which benefits nobody.

The 2-state solution was never viable. The power asymmetry is too great.