If you would like to decenter the genocide of Palestinians, I will gladly discuss your bullshit presumptions in another thread. Feel free to make one and ping me.

You do it by overwhelmingly knocking out the GOP so that there’s room within the blue wave for more progressive candidates.

That’s not how it works. Dems treat their “left” flank as a group to be disciplined, not accommodated. And giving them the greenlight on genocide confirms a move right, not making space for the left.

Dems got their “wave” under Biden. They have moved right and their “progressives” have been cowed.

But genocide should be something you consider a red line regardless of the illogic sold to you by the party.

If, somehow, the Democrats swept with some insane margins, the GOP in its current form would need to evolve or die.

The same applies to Democrats who are committing a genocide, don’t you think?

When a race is this close, the Democrats will always move to the center.

The Democrats move to the center because they are gambling that their “concerned” voters will fall in line and because they absolutely do not want to do the things those “concerned” voters want.

They look at you as someone to be handled by PR, not met with any concessions. And you enable that, including genocide, by voting blue no matter who.

If Kamala wins, THEN you apply pressure.

How? This is not the kind of thing anyone that cares about pressure or leverage says. Electorally you have the most leverage, as an individual, before the election, not after it.

Do you ever question what you are told to do by the party?

You don’t help the guy who praises Hitler,

Kamala Harris is supporting a genocide.

and promises to punish his enemies “from within” the day he takes office.

You mean with cops and feds? Maybe violence against and suppression of protesters? Maybe labelling Palestinian solidarity organizations as terrorists? Maybe signing an EO to allow “the military to use " lethal force” on citizens in the US.

Your “good cop” is already doing that. You just approve.

This also isn’t the only issue by a landslide

What’s the issue? Can you describe it?

considering Trump wants to dismantle NATO

That would be an unmitigated good for humanity. Sometimes Dem voters make great arguments for Trump. Good thing we have principles.

defund the support sent to Ukraine

The people of Ukraine suffer due to a decade-long US pressure campaign to use them to harass and bait Russia. After Russia invaded, the people of Ukraine are now used as inputs to a meat grinder because the US’ goal remains to hurt Russia, not help Ukraine. The US escalated in the first place and then scuttled peace talks.

The best thing for the people of Ukraine would be to end the war diplomatically ASAP.

I think Hillary also wouldn’t have set the stage for fascist take over with judge appointments

Why not? Dem appointees do fashy things in a regular basis.

Everyone knows you should never havecaaked RBG to say anything about indigenous Americans.

endangered abortion rights

Dems endangered abortion rights under Obama by not crystallizing them in federal law or doing any fighting whatsoever for the Supreme Court. The overall Dem strategy actually benefits from this precarity. They want to use it to campaign on forever. Hillary was this kind of person.

Remember, under Obama, abortion rights had already been de facto removed in many red states. The Dobbs decision just added clarity to what was already the status quo, giving it ancillary legal weapons.

moved as far backwards on climate

Dems are just as bad on this. They push fracking and greenwashing and Biden has caused a crisis in solar panel availability with a sinophobic trade war. Both Obama and Biden prioritized oil and other fossil fuel production, making the US a better exporter. They just use different weapons to send money to the ruling class. One greenwaages it and the other doesn’t bother. Hillary was lockstep in this.

They are in many ways more effective because they keep you complacent and accepting of scapegoats.

and would have handled the pandemic better.

Biden demonstrably handled it worse. He normalized the ongoing pandemic (yes it is still happening), deconstructed the monitoring apparatus, and ended benefits. What would Clinton have done better?

The “ceasefire” efforts are a bad faith smokescreen. If you follow the claimed contents of the “ceasefire” they are pushing, it is actually conditions of surrender. The purpose of their “ceasefire” propaganda was to coopt the “ceasefire now” rhetoric of those opposed to genocide. Just to inflate my ego a little, I fought very hard locally to avoid ceasefire rhetoric because I knew it was weak and easy to coopt. I, along with my orgs, successfully promoted that we demand an arms embargo instead, and that is the more durable demand being made by these groups (I probably only had a minor impact on this outside where I live).

Anyways, one clue for how the “ceasefire” line is bullshit is that Israel has assassinated the people they were allegedly negotiating with, to Biden-Harris applause.

Most of the horrors assigned to fascists, as understood in the liberal canon, had precedents among liberal governments, often on much larger scales. Most genocides around the planet, and most people killed in genocide, were carried out by liberals in liberal democracy. They are the genocides of colonialism, including settler- colonialism, inckuding the genocide of indigenous Americans still in living memory. Nationalism is a liberal campaign, it emerges from capitalism and its primary ideology, and liberals celebrate it constantly. Scapegoating and creating marginalized groups has always been something liberals engaged in, though there has also always been a split between those they consider gauche and unacceptable (and they are the “good guys” for opposing) and those that they find acceptable (they are still the “good guys” for this), like their current siniphobia, russophobia, and islamophobia.

Point is, genocide is making a return in liberal discourse to being something they accept. They already did before and were very racist about it. They just took a break, at least in their PR, after they had their sole actual “good guy” war in WWII and needed to rhetorically distance themselves from Nazis and work around the popularity of the left in Europe after the defeat of the Nazis.

This is a tough one, not gonna lie. First, if it was anyone other than Trump and the guarantee of a fascist dictatorship under his rule (and it would be “rule”) running, I would not vote for Harris.

Then I am happy to inform you that Trump would never be a fascist dictator. There is no crisis of capitalism in this country that requires such a thing, the capitalist class that actually dictates the terms likes the system working exactly how it does now. They are in the heart of empire that provides them with super-profits through financial schemes and militarism.

Trump is rude and hamfisted and reactionary, but he cannot take a seat as a proper fascist because fascism is about restoring capitalist interests under major threat, namely an insurgent left, itself responding to a crisis of capitalism like loss of imperialist status and transformation into a further and further imperialized country.

Unfortunately, the US basically has no left. This is pretty obvious from how well normalization of genocide is going.

But given your statement, so long as you understand, correctly, that Trump will not be a dictator, then you will not vote for Harris, and I assume that you won’t advocate for her, either.

So that really just leaves one question: can you find any fault in my logic on Trump becoming a dictator?

Since you just did the thing they described but without addressing it, let me repeat them.

Why do you support a system that repeatedly makes you choose between mega hitler and giga hitler? Surely you recognize that such a system is evil and participation is an endorsement of it.

Dems can do a genocide without your opposition, so that us one difference.

And without outrage from Dem voters

First of all, it should not require 1D chess logic for you to have a red line at genocide. That should be enough for you to take pause and be absolutely certain that you know what you are talking about. If you’re dabbling in this, it should mean you just spent at least the last year reading extensively on genocide, history, Palestine, and political power and strategy. And yet you just use the usual , self-defeating, lesser evil talking point. That is how little concern you have for Palestinians facing genocide.

But let’s say you weren’t just pretending to care about strategy. Let’s say you are you ten years from now feeling, correctly, like you did something very wrong and this has led you to be curious about how to build power, so you begin to critically engage with the propaganda you have been sold your entire life. Pretty shameful that you didn’t so it when brown people faced genocide, but here we are.

Your logic is that you must always support your party candidate, who is allegedly some measurable amount better, even while doing a genocide, than the other with any chance of winning the election. You’re just minimizing harm, right?

Well no. What you are doing is taking what little leverage you have in your vote and saying, “I will never stand for anything, I will vote for you no matter what horrible things you do”. And your political class, the one in your faction, is glad for this. You have done what you were told, you have made yourself a suppirter that expects nothing, just a cog in their genocidal machine. Four years roll around and you are somehow surprised that your team has moved farther right, done the same kinds of things, or done them worse, or done more if the worst things. Maybe it turns on trans people, as it is doing in Texas by supporting a transphobic candidate. Or immigrants, which Dems already did. You wonder how we got here and then tell everyone “vote blue no matter who, the Republicans are worse!”

You’re doing the thing the meme is making fun of

Probably lol

That would maybe work if there were test elections and then the real deal a little after

It also works for real elections. It has precipitated realignments and the downfall and replacement of parties in the US’ own history, even. Those had deeper material roots, but then so would the acceptability of supporting genocide.

You are repeating a line that really just disempowers you and those that align with you. It tells you that your role, your “power”, is just to support whoever the party picks for you, or else. This is false and self-defeating logic.

Having a dicktator for the next 4 years (minimum) is a bit too much to send the message. It is just cutting off your nose to spite your face.

There was already a Trump presidency. It was from 2017 to 2021. It was not a dictatorship. The country ran basically the same as before, in fact, though he was simply hamfisted in hiw he approached reactionary policies, and naturally this made for great media time and Democrats calling themselves “the resistance”. The Biden-Harris administration largely continued his policies, but that “resistance” immediately dissolved, it was just a partisan PR ploy and was not about undoing concrete policy impacts. Biden still threw kids in cages and massively ramped up refugee deportations, attempting to (illegally) prevent refugees from even applying if they crossed the border when undocumented. Biden kept the trade wars. Biden fully coopted and reversed sentiment on racial justice in policing, pivoting Democrats at all levels to be pro-vip and providing large funding increases to racist police squads.

The political class operates far more similarly to one another than they do to you. They just warp perception through partisanship and propaganda. This does not mean they are identical, just it is nowhere near as dramatic as you describe: the class that actually controls this country has no interest in allowing the dictator you are imagining, it isn’t going to happen, and the horrific policies you are thinking of will have corresponding ones from Democrats, provided with a smile and an appropriation. Include in that list: genociding Palestine.

Great intro to philosophy lesson.

I did not describe anything particularly philosophical.

In the real world, we have the choice between Harris and Trump

Oh, so you just mean you are trying to be condescending and pretend I am not being reakistic. Unfortunately for this excuse for why you will vote for someone doing a genocide, I am pragmatic. I criticize your ideas of “strategy”, which are just bog standard lesser evil vote shaming trotted out to discipline Democrats’ empathetic voters every 4 years and suggest you take the first steps towards empowerment by doing the same. My hope would be that them asking you to support genocide would be enough to take that srep., that you could accept that there is not a greater evil than genocide, and that as a good person, you would be an opponent of genocide rather than complicit.

If you want to talk more specifically on being pragmatic when it cones to political power,I would be happy to do so. It is mostly about building leverage, which is basically the exact opposite of your rhetoric.

You can forget anyone else exists because our election system is broken.

The system is working as intended.

But in your terminology, would you say it is more broken or less broken than when the Whigs dissolved and an abolitionist party took its place over the issue of slavery? In this scenario, you would be someone saying that you must always vote for the pro-slavers.

If I don’t vote, one of them will still win.

Yes, that is true. But are you going to orient yourself in opposition to genociders or are you going to decide on which one to support? I think it should be a red line.

Never again means never again for anyone. What do you think that phrase means?

Now, without philosophizing, what do we do to stop the violence?

“The violence” is far too vague for me to give you any real answer. If you mean US support for genocide, then you will need to join groups opposed to the genocide, participate in political education, and build those organizations so that they can make demands and enact material change, such as blockading weapons manufacturers. Or, if you can only understand politics through elections, you can spend your time organizing a principled anti-genocide voting bloc, ideally tied to some material interest. You have no leverage as a voter unless you can credibly threaten to withhold your vote. And your leverage is dramatically decreased when you act as an individual rather than an organized bloc.

Is that practical enough for you?

And here is the problem with your argument. This is what I wanted you to say.

I had already implied it. I did not say, “there are no Palestinian signatories”, did I? I said it was a conspicuous subset of people, namely the heads if NGOs and party insiders. This necessitates diversity of positions taken and of class dynamics. I am not tokenizing Palestinians or treating them as a monolith to throw around like a cudgrl, saying “this is what Palestinians want so you should to”. Solidarity requires that you become informed and work in solidarity with the oppressed, not seek out tokens. People throughout this thread are trying to use Palestinians in this way to justify their complicity.

Almost none of the Palestinians around here, or anyone they know, is in the camp that they won’t vote, because they know that Trump being in office means things, like a lot of the Palestinians in the US, will be sent back to Palestine, to be part of the genocide, they are trying to save people from.

How did you get a read on what all of the Palestinians in your area are doing wrt supporting Harris? I am very active among my local community and I would never say “almost none” about basically anything. But I can tell you that I can turn out the vast majority who attend community events to anti-Harris actions where they change the slogans and have conversations to that effect.

Maybe, like the bias within those who signed this letter, where you go, creates an oppositional bubble.

I spend most of my time reading: Palestine in community centers and appropriate religious gatherings. I don’t think it is particularly biased towards radical or left action. The wider group has to press local imams to be less defeatist, even.

Maybe the ones here are in a less privileged position, one that makes them significantly more vulnerable to the GOP’s bigotry?

My community is poor and vulnerable.

Simply living in a state that will harbor immigrants against the Feds, type of privilege.

ICE constantly raids. They tend to focus on the Latino community, though not exclusively. My compatriots do direct action to delay or prevent arrest at suspected raid targets.

There are ~47,000 christian Palestinians, ~15 million Palestinians. So this isn’t the caveat you are trying to create, in this informal space.

It is the caveat I am trying to create. I know Christian Palestinians. The entirety of my point was about not assuming uniformity.

The Palestinians, and the greater muslim population here, remember when Trump was in office. When many of them were arrested, caged, and deported, on the flimsiest of bullshit, and had their property, businesses, and families stripped from them, in the anti-muslim fervor.

Deportations were around the same as under Obama and Biden-Harris. They have increased over the last year, targeting student protesters and political organizers. The primary impact of Trump’s policies are: basically anyone brown from the Middle East was to make reentry after travel extremely difficult, forcing people here to suffer because they could not visit dying relatives or weddings or family with new children. I was active across several states during this period, including dramatically racist red states, and do not know what you are talking about. To be clear, Palestinian immigrants have been under constant and extreme and unfair scrutiny for decades, facing exactly the flimsy excuses for deportation that you describe. This is why one of the things we focus on in our work is protecting Palestinian immigrants from risk and doing whatever can to get them full citizenship. It is usually then that they feel comfortable taking risks for some kinds of solidarity actions. Many lament their inability to participate for years because they are worried they will be deported and/or separated from their families if they do so much as attend a rally. Some do so anyways.

The examples you give are the kinds of things that happened before and after Trump as well. But despite being across several communities and doing direct work among them, there was never a sentiment that this had changed.

The Latino community faced a dramatic increase in such deportations and arrests, particularly due to Trump’s targeting of DREAMers (who Obama made vulnerable via incomplete legalization).

But you will vote for genociders? Please do some introspection.

Please, tell me more about Germany in the 1930s and how, after they murdered the trans folks, and the gays, and then the socialist (yeah, they were pretty high up on the list), the genocide just could not have gotten worse.

Palestine is already being ethnically cleansed and Israel is bombing 3 of its neighbors and invading one. All of this happens with the permission and necessary support of the Biden-Harris administration and it is maximalist.

Under the Nazis in WWII, the “final solution” was actually fairly ad hoc. It was not the original plan, of which there were several that they scrambled around for, some of which were simply made unfeasible, like The Madagascar Plan. There were also plans to create reservations, modeled after the US system. Oppressing their primary scapegoat was the consistent plan, but it’s exact form was easily negotiable among them, it was not seen as a core necessity to run an extermination campaign or complete expulsion. Presumably you, someone being very condescending to me about history because I tell you not to support genocide, is aware of this.

Israel is actually different in thus regard. It’s existence has always been premised on the displacement and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population. Its founders spoke and wrote openly of this and participated in pogroms of Palestinians. The Zionist entity is not suddenly doing genocide, it has been for decades, it has just dialed it up to a maximalist degree given its capabilities and interest in self-preservation. But do not forget that it has never stopped expanding and engaging in settler-colonialism, never stopped engaging in pogroms, never stopped dividing The West Bank into concentration camps, districts smaller than those in Apartheid South Africa, never stopped considering Palestinians subhuman.

Be on the right side of history.

The solution requires commitment to building power, i.e. leverage and numbers, gaining a political education, and engaging in action.

What I am suggesting is just the absolute bare minimum, and you all know it: genocide should be a red line and you are complicit if you vote for someone doing a genocide.

Your vote isn’t strategic, either. You are just demonstrating that you will put up with anything and will be ignorable for the indefinite future for them to do these and greater crimes. And by justifying it to yourself, you will fail to take the necessary steps to, in your words, “solve the problem”.

Nope I’m happy to have that discussion. Feel free to make a thread and ping me.

I know you, like the others, probably won’t. This is because you have the situation completely reversed: this is a bad faith deflection that you cannot support and don’t really care about. You are only interested to the extent that you can feel like it is a gotcha and use this to stop thinking about your complicity in genocide.