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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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politics
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I think its useful to distinguish between Democrats and democrats. I try to use Democrats for party officials, elected officials, talking heads within the party etc. I try to use democrats for democratic voters.
Democrats do not have the priorities of their voters in mind, and have, since the 90's, wished that they actually had republicans for voters. Democrats don't want to be managing a leftwing party (the votership they largely have), they want to be managing a rightwing party. The Democratic party reconfigured its self to be diet Republican after Carter and have been failing forwards ever since.
I lived through all of that and you put it just right: They kept failing forward. If they weren't the only alternative to the Republicans the party would have died after 1984.
It's probably obvious we need more choices but how?
It’s the system, honestly.
The U.S. government was always designed so that it would be ruled by ‘the top’. Through failures of imagination, inability to build in flexibility, and the entrenched powers doing what they can to grow their power, we’ve wound up with a system where money is power and people are merely numbers that can be shuffled to produce desired end results.
I’m quickly approaching a point of throwing up my hands, but if there is a needle that can be threaded by ‘the people’ to stitch back together our fraying democracy, it’s this —
A state-by-state ballot initiative effort to remove political drawing of electoral maps.
Changing voting (likely also ballot initiative) to remove the first past the poll system, so that we use instant run-off (aka ranked choice) to give people the opportunity to vote for who they want without throwing their vote away.
Removing barriers to voting and establishing a national holiday during election days.
Overturn Citizens United. Overhaul campaign finance. Eliminate unknown funding sources from politics. Eliminate business contributions and PAC’s entirely. Narrowly define acceptable lobbying, and broadly define what lobbying can’t be.
Strong consumer privacy laws that have teeth, so that micro targeted campaigns can’t be used to manipulate people into swinging elections. Case in point - Trump only won the swing states by 11,000 votes (total) in 2016.
And using ballot initiatives to have enough states join the national popular vote interstate compact to render the electoral college moot.
Primaries. The people have to show up and actually vote for what they want into the primary (rather than trying to vote according to political strategies). With enough sustained effort and time a coalition of like-minded representatives could be built up to slowly change the system to a more representational one.
I've been doing this for 24 years and have the "Kucinich for President" bumper sticker to prove it.
When should I expect it to start working?
Same. Tons of Bernie merch.
You shouldn't. Your thinking is linear and deterministic, but elections and society structures are not. Voting for X over Y period is not a guarantee of X. It's a chance at X, assuming an entire host of other people vote with you and a number of other factors fall into place, but not a guarantee.
In other words: I am too weird to ever be satisfied with the results of an election.
Be the change you want to see friend. Organize, distribute literature, engage others in honest and open dialogue (like you're doing), and encourage those around you to vote in every election and primary, or to run if able.
Really though, we just gotta last another 15 years or so and then the climate change feedback cycle will take care of everything
I think learning how to survive the collapse is a better use of my time at this point.
You won't make it alone
My state is one of the last to vote in primaries. Biden was the only candidate left by the time I voted in 2020.
Vote for third parties?
Doesn't work in our system. To do that we'd need to use the same broken system we have to implement some other kind of voting system. But for it to work in time we would've had to have started in the 80s.
Not necessarily:
https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php
Alaska implemented ranked choice voting after voters approved the measure in 2020
I suspect the DNC is gonna try another Bill Clinton style southern strategy and appeal to disenfranchised conservatives by shifting further to the right. And current democrat voters will shift to the right with them, defending their right wing actions tooth and nail.
Yeah, it seems with every candidate, we veer further to the right
Feelings aside, Biden is objectively one of the most, if not the most, progressive President we've had in modern history.
I mean, being to the left of Obama and Clinton isn't exactly hard.
Reread the comment that I was responding to.
No, I know who you're responding to, but pointing out that Biden is marginally more left-leaning than the guy who repealed Glass-Steagall and the guy who created the assassination-robot squad doesn't really undermine his point. FDR's party gutted the New Deal, Biden being slightly more pro-union doesn't really mean much to the overall trend.
For all of his progressive economic accomplishments, FDR also interned in the Japanese and allowed for the creation of one of the world's worst toxic waste sites.
The point being that I don't expect inhuman levels of perfection for my political leaders, and I don't think you should either. There was much more to FDR's administration than the New Deal, and when it comes the historical comparison Biden may have fallen short on matching the New Deal (although objectively he passed the biggest infrastructure and progressive economics bill since the New Deal), he has an undeniably better track record than FDR in terms of human rights, civil rights and environmental protection. There's really no comparison.
(FWIW, it's also worth noting that FDR had a significantly stronger Democratic backing in congress, with IIRC, a large supermajority in the Senate for multiple years. Historical political context is also important.)
Like it or not, It's just a point of fact that Biden is the most progressive president we've had in at least 50 years, if not a century, when looking at the entirety of his record so far.
Biden is currently supporting the Palestinian genocide as we speak.
The world's first two-way genocide 🙄
A) Glad you were eventually able to edit your post to more than a single emoji. B) You know that Palestinians aren't Hamas, right? C) You understand that it's not a, "two-way genocide," if only side can actually commit genocide, right? Hamas may want to kill evey Jew, but they've only managed to kill 1,200 people in their initial attack and 210 soldiers since then. Meanwhile, Israel has killed a minimum of 25,000 people, and by there own estimates only 9,000 of them were militants. (Also, 9,000 is a number the IDF gave without any evidence, so it's probably a gross overestimate.)
There's a reason that, of the two groups, only the Israeli government is being accused of genocide in the ICJ, and it's not because the international community likes Hamas. Genocide isn't just a declaration in a charter, it is a specific series of actions against an ethnic group, and it sure seems like Israel is committing those actions.
It's only fair, I was just short on time.
Not all Palestinians are Hamas or even sympathetic to Hamas. Not all Israelis are IDF or supporters of Netenyahu.
Every single innocent person on either side of this war is a victim.
This is a stunningly bizarre point.
We've already established that the founding mission of Hamas was a jihad in the name eliminating Israeli Jews. To take it a step further, nations like Iran, who back Hamas, have openly called for "wiping Israel of the map" on multiple occasions. So not only is the intent real and well documented, but the actions of Hamas, including the war crimes of taking civilian hostages, are consistent with those original goals. Hamas leaders are still openly talking about a one state solution today, as are most of their supporters, even in the west.
But to your point, that intent doesn't matter and only capability matters.
I find that quite ironic considering the thousands of missiles fired from Gaza into Israel by Hamas as part of their coordinated terror attack. The IDF estimates (grain of salt, best number I can find right now) there were 2000 Hamas missile attacks on October 7th alone. There have been continuous attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah since then.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-gaza-rockets.html
The only thing stopping those missiles from hitting Israeli civilians was the American Iron Dome missile defense system. Had it not been for American support of Israel, it's very possible that the combined forces of Hamas and Hezbollah, with the backing of Iran and Russia, could have very well been capable of waging an all out genocidal attack on Israel, as they have repeatedly stated is their shared intention.
In that regard, are Israel guilty of simply being able to defend themselves better than Hamas could defend Gaza? Would it have been better if Israel hadn't had Iron Dome and been hit with some thousand missiles from multiple different Islamic militant groups on multiple fronts?
Of course not, which is also why the "accusation" of genocide against Israel has been rejected by every key member of the UN as baseless and without merit or evidence.
We don't get to simply refine words until they mean what we want them to mean. Hamas and Netenyahu both wanted war, played off each other for political power, and have both openly called for a unacceptable single-state solution "from river to sea". Which, as a worst and most cynical interpretation, can be seen as a call for genocide from both parties. Neither should have ever been given political power, and neither should be allowed to hold power in the future. But it does take two to tango, and Hamas' intent and actions do matter here as well, especially when they are not helpless and have used plenty of potentially lethal force towards Israel. (And again, there is the war crime of taking civilian hostages.)
This is on them, not the United States, who have (thanks to Iron Dome) protected the lives of countless innocent Israelis and who have called for the IDF to show restraint and to work towards a two-state solution with an autonomous Palestine that Hamas are unfit to rule over.
Doesn't matter if it's Biden, Bernie or FDR's ghost in the Oval Office, America will continue to support its most important ally in the middle east, especially as they take heavy fire from all directions by groups whose state intent has always been their annihilation.
Well, Israel's allies (France, Germany, Hungary, Austria, U.S., and U.K., by my count) have objected, and most of the other Western nations have declined to take a stance. Meanwhile, more than 25 nations in the Middle East, Africa, and South America support the case. So, if you think that this case is meritless because, “key,” U.N. members don't support it, your ignoring massive international outcry and showing off your Eurocentric bias.
Yeah, this is just wrong. It's not American, it's Israeli. We've contributed money and missiles to it, but it was designed and built by an Israeli defense firm and the IDF. Americans want to believe that Israel would be helpless without them, but Israel has a first-world economy and a very well-funded military. This isn't Ukraine; there would economic and political consequences for Netanyahu if Israel lost our support, but they don't need our support to survive. Biden could withdraw support to Israel due to human rights violations without creating an existential threat to Isreal.
You're right, so let's look at the U.N.’s legal definition of genocide:
Killing members of the group (check); Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (check); Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (check); Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (check); Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (...nope, not that one).
Any of these constitute genocide, and Israel is at 4 out of 5.
Finally, you seem very concerned with what could happen while ignoring what is happening. Yes, Hezbollah and Hamas could commit genocide against Israelis with enough support and resources. Yes, Israel could have much higher civilians casualties without the Iron Dome (which, again, is an Israeli creation). If these things happened, there should be international outcry and U.S. intervention. But Hezbollah and Hamas can't win a war against Israel, much less commit genocide, and Israel does have the Iron Dome.
But what is happening is that Israel is waging a campaign of destruction that has killed at least 1% of the population of Gaza. At a bare minimum, 64% of those casualties, 16,000 people, were civilians, and most of them were women and children. Their actions have been described as collective punishment and ethnic cleansing by human rights groups, and there is a genocide case against them before the ICJ.
These are not hypotheticals; this is what is happening right now. And they are happening with the support of the U.S. and, “one of the most, if not the most, progressive President we've had in modern history.”
No, the accusation is meritless because there is little evidence to support it:
There are upwards of 2 million Palestinians in Gaza alone, and if Israel's intention was to inflict destruction of Palestinian life, wouldn't there be far more than 20,000 of Palestinians dead? And, if the goal was genocide, why would Israel be only focusing Gaza and not the West Bank where there are upwards of 3 million? Not to mention the population of ethnic Palestinians who live or work safely and peacefully inside of Israel.
The world has seen genocide many times, from the American genocide of Native People, to the Armenian Genocide, to the Holocaust. Jews know first hand what a ethnic genocide looks like, and this ain't it.
It really doesn't matter who does or doesn't support accusations, or who are allies with who, because legal matters are not democratic and instead based on evidence.
Now when it comes to Hamas, on the other hand, they have made it easy by writing their genocidal intent directly into their founding language. They said their quiet part out loud on day 1, and while they've tried to legitimize themselves by moderating their official language, they clearly haven't moderated their actions. Their allies and backers have made it equally clear that their intent is the complete destruction of Israel and Israeli Jews.
Please don't omit the parts that hurt your argument, it's a waste of time and it doesn't work or help.
Remember when you said:
The Genocide Convention does not support your original claim that Hamas' actions cannot be considered genocide because they aren't capable. The part that you omitted is very clear that intent is everything.
What? By that definition alone, every war in human history could/should be labeled a genocide.
That doesn't pass the smell test, and its why you're not doing a service to your argument by omitting inconvenient parts of definitions. It's doing these things "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" that meets the criteria for genocide under the Genocide Convention.
I'm not sure what you're citing here, as it links to an entire CNN news feed.
Not that it's relevant, because as we've just established, you've omitted important language from your mischaracterized version of the definition.
But to get back to it, it is Hamas whose intent (as expressed in their founding charter and many times since) and actions (as perpetrated on and after October 7th) most certainly meet the Genocide Convention standards for genocide that you've (at least partially) listed here.
...You seem to have lost the thread on your own argument: that Hamas' actions cannot be considered genocide as the don't have the capacity to pull it off. (Which, again, is an ass-pull and not consistent with the Genocide Convention definition in the slightest.)
Hamas, combined with its allies and backers, absolutely have the capability to murder massive numbers of Israeli civilians. They have also all expressed genocidal intent against Israel at various points in time. Israel is facing attacks from multiple Islamic militant groups as we speak.
These are not opinions, but facts.
If not for Israel's ability to defend itself from these very real attacks, a direct result of ~$130 Billion of US military aide since its inception, we would be seeing massive numbers of Israeli civilians dead from the very real attacks on Israel during this war.
The fact that Israel is able to defend itself from most of Hamas attacks, has no bearing on the classification of this war as a genocide. American investment in Israeli defense has helped save countless lives of innocent Israelis from a daily volley of missiles from openly genocidal, Iran-backed groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Oh, I wasn't ignoring the intent to eliminate an ethnic group; I know that it's necessary for for proving a genocide, and will be the most difficult part of South Africa's case. Maybe they'll find something that can clarify Israel's intent, like an official calling for Gaza to be completely reduced to rubble, or a member of the Iraeli parliament calling on for nuclear strikes to, “crush Gaza,”, or a cabinet official calling what's happening in Gaza an ethnic cleansing, or an Israeli minister calling for settlers to illegally take control of the territory. (Of course, this is just a few recent examples from this war. You could go from the Nakba all the way to the illegal West Bank settlements if you wanted to give the intent in a historical context.)
Anyway, you've really illustrated why the American centrist is so ridiculous. You honestly want to argue that a nuclear-powered (yes, Israel has nukes, even if they don't admit it) military with a $20 billion budget that is systematically destroying a civilian population couldn't possibly be committing genocide because none of their founding documents say, “genocide.” Meanwhile, you also want me to accept that a terrorist organization with homemade rockets, that controls an area the smaller than Detroit, with a military budget of $350 million, is just as capable of committing genocide. Not only that, any deaths they cause are a genocide, because their charter calls for genocide (which is obviously ridiculous; by this logic, Dylan Roof committed genocide). You are a deeply unserious person and I'm done with this absurd exercise.