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76 points

Trump is even worse than Biden on Gaza. I get trying to push Biden to do better, but let’s all keep the truth in mind. The actual truth, not the click bait bullshit horse race covered by the media.

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41 points
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Electoral pressure is literally the only lever we have to push Biden to do better. There’s no other way. Biden’s team is making a bet that we aren’t serious and that they can just use Trump to hold us hostage in the party.

So! No ceasefire, no votes. If this war is still going on by November, and Netanyahu has been saying it will, I will not vote for Biden.

It’s so easy to earn our votes! Why is Biden sabotaging his own campaign?

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11 points

Electoral pressure is literally the only lever we have to push Biden to do better. There’s no other way.

This is correct, barring revolution.

Biden’s team is making a bet that we aren’t serious and that they can just use Trump to hold us hostage in the party.

You are incorrect. Biden’s team, under the direction of the Democrat party, have taken away your lever because they don’t want to win. The Democrats have said this, publicly. They said back in 2016 that they would rather lose to Trump than win with Bernie. The Democrat party is happy to lose, always.

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5 points

To say that they don’t want to win is to imply a secret conspiracy to lose, but that’s not what we see. With Hillary, they didn’t conspire to make Hillary lose. They really did want her to win! They didn’t want Bernie to win because he wasn’t a Democrat. Winning with Bernie would have fundamentally changed their shitty party, they didn’t want that. That’s just lose/lose for them.

If this analogy applies, if they would rather lose the election than stop doing genocide, then death to America. I won’t give a shit about who wins, hopefully whoever wins destroys this shithole.

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-5 points

The trouble you guys face is Trump is worse.

Just on Israel-Palestine alone, Trump is the person that recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city. If that isn’t informative about his attitude about the situation…

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27 points

Yeah, and that’s Biden’s fault, not the voters. He is letting an unqualified candidate beat him because he won’t stop funding the war on Gaza.

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21 points

If the choices are genocide lite and genocide deluxe, the only answer is for America to be defeated. MLs call it revolutionary defeatism.

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0 points

Don’t know why you have downvotes, this is sound logic, trump will embolden Israel even more while fucking up a lot of other important stuff e.g. Ukraine

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-7 points

While I have serious issues with Biden on Israel, he really has no ability to force a ceasefire. (Short of sending US troops in to enforce it, and that would be a terrible idea.).

Biden could pull all US support for Israel, but that would create a power vacuum that China or (more likely) Russia would gladly fill. It still wouldn’t end the genocide, but it would put a wedge between Iran and the Palestinians. (Iran is their only powerful ally.)

Biden’s rhetoric needs to change, and we need Israel to feel some real heat for their actions, but the US doesn’t have Israel on a leash.

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11 points

While I have serious issues with Biden on Israel, he really has no ability to force a ceasefire. (Short of sending US troops in to enforce it, and that would be a terrible idea.).

Did you forget about the UN Security Council votes? The ones the US ruined?

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11 points
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33 points
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Trump is worse than Biden on anything and everything. But if any president can get away with supporting a genocide campaign, is this not the way they get away with it? By simply claiming it will ruin their campaign efforts?

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-3 points

It’s sad ppl only read your first sentence and then are fully satisfied with whatever shit you throw on, as long as you don’t specifically say ‘Biden is really bad’

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17 points

I think it’s Biden’s responsibility to not support genocide, he owes it to his voters, and if he wants to keep them, he needs to change.

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-6 points

A president has already gotten away with it. Trying to selectively punish Biden now is actually a bit of hypocrisy. We should have done it in the first place. But we largely got in that position because of people who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Clinton, etc.

Biden’s moves are optically bad. But make a lot of sense as far as strategy goes. Traditionally. You have a much more powerful position to bargain as an ally than as an enemy. But that does not stop people like yourself from making hyperbolic claims.

Don’t get me wrong. Eileen, libertarian and communist. I have no real investment in Biden. I’m simply intelligent enough to know that he or Trump are going to win. And that he is by far the better choice. Which you yourself said. You just want to make some example of him despite your own face etc.

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8 points
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30 points

Unfortunately, the Democrats keep going back to the well of “what are you going to do, vote for the other guy?” Their success on this has been hit or miss the last few cycles. In fairness, it’s been a viable strategy in the past, if Democrats can get those few persuadable voters in the middle of the political spectrum to vote Democratic and not Republican, that’s a net win for the Democratic candidate. But, that begs the question of “are there enough persuadable voters left to offset losses when parts of your base stay home?” With Biden’s continued support for Israel’s actions, it seems that their political calculus says, “yes”.

However, we’ve seen this go both ways in the last few cycles. Clinton deployed the tactic in 2016 and commenters were out in force to brow-beat any of the deplorables who offered anything less than a full-thoated support of her turn. It got her the popular vote, but that has never mattered, she lost the election. The “vote blue no matter who” force was on full display again in 2020 and managed to eek out a win. And here you are again, ramping up for 2024. It’s going to be interesting to see how it works out this time.

Biden in 2020 had the advantage of being somewhat unknown. Everyone knew him as Obama’s Vice President and that provided him some of Obama’s popularity. This time around, he’s much more of a known quantity and he’s going to be running on his own record. Brow-beating people with “anyone but Trump” seems less likely to work when voters may be looking at specific policies and actions which they find at odds with their beliefs. When Biden was more of an unknown, it was easy for voters to map their own views onto him. We see this with polls which include “generic Democrat/Republican” as an option. People map their own views onto the “generic” view and so are more supportive. When a candidate becomes a known quantity, support can drop off, as the voters know which areas they agree and disagree with a particular politician. In the same way, Biden’s policies are now more understood by the voters and people may be less inclined to support him based on those policies.

Personally, I’m doubtful this sort of brow-beating is going to work this cycle. Biden’s popularity isn’t fantastic and he’s too well known for people to map their views onto him. Moreover, responding to people being upset with his actions with a brow-beating seems like a poor response to peoples’ legitimate issues. It seems more likely to convince them to disengage or push back even harder. Sure, what are they going to do, vote for the other guy? No, probably not, but they may also not show up on election day. And with the closely divided state of the US electorate, that might just be enough to swing things the other way.

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-6 points
Deleted by creator
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11 points
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Since when is Centrist defined as “I will shutdown the border as soon as you sign that bill”, “More kids in cages than the last guy”, “No prosecutions for leaders who incite a violent coup”, “More weapons for genocide”, “Let’s destroy the economy of our allies”, “We must keep the torture center at Guantanamo open”, “Who’s Epstein?”, “No I won’t pardon Peltier”, “No I won’t commute sentence of political prisoners”, “Yes, more black people in jail”, “Yes, it’s OK for prisoners to produce $11Bn in goods for private companies through slave labor”, “I swear we’ll do something about women’s health but it won’t be part of our political platform for the election”.

All of the evidence says we have the same two groups of white supremacist leaders we have always had: the plantation owners who bought the slaves, and the financiers who sold the slaves. You want to claim that the financiers are “centrist” in that formulation because they don’t personally whip people?

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8 points
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21 points

I get trying to push Biden to do better

Do you, as a group, though?

Every time someone posts an article about how it’s a bad thing that Biden is actively contributing to a genocide, the top comment is Trump whataboutism.

Yes, Trump is much worse, both on Israel and in general, but that’s not the fucking point!

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8 points

Biden ain’t doing shit. He’s gonna go to Michigan and lie, then he’s going to maintain the same policies the US has for decades. It’s silly to think otherwise. And so it goes.

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-9 points

Trump is much worse, both on Israel and in general, but that’s not the fucking point!

Except that the only two actual choices for the next 4 year cycle are Trump and Biden. Do that really us the point.

Putting your progressive politics focus on the president is a losing game, anyway. Praxis is local.

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21 points

Wouldn’t this energy be better invested in getting Biden to stop supporting the Israeli genocide so that his Arab and Muslim voters don’t abandon him?

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20 points
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I didn’t realize the primary was over.

It’s funny how that and the fact that the Democratic party has already, against it’s own rules, removed all candidates other than Biden from the ballots in 10% of the States never gets brought up.

Instead we get a bunch of people posting in an attempt to shame people into voting for someone who supports genocide because ‘what else are you going to do’

I wish the Democratic party acted like Trump was the existential threat we all recognize him to be.

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17 points

So as long as he’s marginally better than a deranged fascist rapist, criticism of him isn’t allowed at all?

Fuck off with that authoritarianism bullshit!

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14 points
Deleted by creator
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0 points

Um, what? How are you entirely unaware of the Trump administration’s support of Saudi Arabia commiting genocide in Yemen while Saudi officials dumped loads of cash at Trump resorts?

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6 points
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Just for the records, the same Yemen genocide that Biden continued to support and the same Yemen that he is now directly bombing?

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12 points

On foreign policy the US remains a genocidal bully with questionable morals and alliances. But domestically the Democrats present a veneer of somewhat moral, inclusive values. So with the presented choice I would recommend to go with the seemingly moral guy and try to hold him accountable, rather than vote for the fascist maniac that acts the same domestically and foreign.

Just hope you get locally active to organize a stronger left for the future.

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25 points
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7 points

He’s not my president. Can’t do much but protest here and hold my own representatives accountable.

I can’t fault anyone for not voting for a war criminal.

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9 points

The Canadian Conservative party is the one that usually runs on “imagine/look at how bad the other guy would be” as a party platform. It’s a bad look and a sign that you have nothing better. It’s politicking for the sake of politicking.

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0 points
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It is a bad look and a sign of a lack of good options, but that’s the situation.

Also, all Canadian parties run like that except for the Greens and the Bloc, and it’s probably because they know they won’t form a government

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