wpb

There's about 100 million evangelical christians in the US, and a LifeWay poll in 2017 showed that about 80% essentially considered themselves zionists. That's 80 million. There's 15.8 million jews worldwide. So the non-Jewish zionists outweigh Jewish zionists by a fair margin. Heck, they outweigh the zionist and the non-zionist jews taken together by a beefy margin, even.

If you're equating the Jewish people with zionism, or conflating being in favor of zionism as somehow being benevolent to the Jewish people as a whole, you are treating the Jewish people as a monolith and are yourself being anti-semitic. Zionism is perfectly compatible with anti-semitism (see for example all those anti-semitic christians who enthusiastically support zionism), and anti-zionism is in itself not anti-semitic (cf Jewish voice for peace).

So making "zionist" a slur has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with being anti-anti-semitic or not.

The same way I don't think we should capitulate to framing "cracker" as a slur, or to framing "black lives matter" as a racist thing to say, I don't think we should capitulate to framing things like "from the river to the sea" or "zionist" as antisemitic.

But, as a thought experiment, let's indulge in this doublespeak trash. What is a good alternative? So far I've got:

• Israeli colonizers
• Jewish supremacists
• genocidal sacks of shit
• Israeli apartheidists
• Isreal expansionists
• Israeli warmongerers
• people in favor of the genocide and apartheid committed by Israel (in full, every time you need to say zionist)
• modern day nazis
• zionazis (technically not zionist!)

So all of this liberal crybaby nomenclature trash aside, I actually do think "zionist" is in itself a fairly useless term for the Israeli apartheid question (as Norman Finkelstein and Judith Butler do too). While one faction of zionism pursued the nakba and massacres from fairly early on, and while this faction has been quite successful, there are other notions of zionism which do not entail murdering children or colonizing a country. When Netanyahu and Chomsky can both legitimately refer to themselves as zionists, I think it's clear that zionism is too broad a term to be useful in the current ongoing genocide and the ethnic cleansing that has been going on for the better part of a century.

Oh my goodness you are in for a treat! Pourover coffee is in my opinion the best way to prepare a cup. Get yourself a v60, and the paper filters that go with it, watch a James Hoffman video on proper v60 technique, and enjoy. It should actually give a cleaner cup (less residue) than the French press.

I totally agree, broken system and all. Still a free market. The free market is inherently a broken system.

So the fact that "more stats abt people living paycheck to paycheck" would convince you strongly, strongly indicates that I'm not explaining myself well enough. I'm not under the impression that if I did communicate effectively you would magically be convinced. And that's not necessarily my goal, but I would like to be able to have a productive convo with you, so I'm gonna give it another shot.

Here's two facts that I'm convinced of:

• if a consistent set of policies/campaign promises enjoy massive popular support across the aisle, then making such positions a core part of your campaign and your efforts when elected will give you a much higher chance of getting elected
• progressive policies (i.e., paid sick leave, parental leave, union-strengthening laws, universal health care, antitrust legislation, increasing solvency of social security, and so on (note that I do not mention culture war stuff)) enjoy broad popular support, across the aisle, in all states

If you believe these facts (and you don't need to), then an unavoidable conclusion is that if Harris would've run a progressive campaign, she would've had a much higher chance of winning.

The weakness in my argument is the two facts I mentioned. They require evidence. I've given a smidge of evidence for the second fact (the smoking gun of the ballot measures in Missouri). A better way to go about it is to find some policy oriented polls targeting a good cross section of the electorate which show that people (R, D, and I) generally support progressive policies (think paid sick leave, think universal health care).

The first fact is much harder to prove, but I would argue that common sense gets you a long way here. But for a more empirical approach, look at the Sanders and Obamna campaigns and the fairly broad and enthusiastic support they enjoyed.

The reason I think I wasn't explaining myself well enough is because the stats you're asking for do almost nothing to support my argument. At best, they're indirect, weak, evidence of the second fact. It shouldn't convince you if I find you some stats about the working homeless and paycheck-to-paycheck livers.

EDIT: I feel like I understand a bit better where your response is coming from. You think that I'm arguing in favor of the effectivity of progressive policies, rather than the popularity. I happen to believe both, but we're talking about why the dems lost, and in a democracy, the popularity of policies is what matters un such discussions, not their effectivity. Again, it's a bit off topic, but for the effectivity you could look at the rate of homelessness and paycheck-to-paycheck situations in more progressively legislated and often poorer countries in western Europe. You'll find that aside from popular (which is what matters here), these policies are also crazy effective.

The point that I'm making is that across the board, progressive policies are popular. And that does win elections, just look at Obamna's and Sanders' campaigns. That one state was just one extreme example of this fact.

If only someone had warned us in 1867, 1885, and 1894!

I completely agree with you that the results (monopolies and oligopolies) are undesirable, and you're doing a great job of explaining why the results are undesirable. But you're not explaining why you think monopolies and oligopolies are not the natural outcome of a free market. The free market is not a good thing.

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What are you talking about, this is the natural conclusion of a free market.