Stop doing business with Israel until the genocide stops
Israel is happy to keep buying our arms but it more than capable of carrying on without us for several years. They've armed to keep pace with Iran and have done a good job at doing so - far surpassing them in nuclear capability. We'd have to do considerably more than just not do business with them.
Not doing business is something we can do first while we work on the rest.
I agree, but they're mainly thinking about not losing our high readiness military bases in Israel. Israel and Kuwait represent our ability to act quickly in the middle east. That somehow seems to be worth more than a genocide.
Doesn't the US only have a radar base in Israel? I think construction of an airfield started under T-rump but carriers + Kuwait + Cyprus cover everything
One of our largest ammunition depots anywhere in the world is in Israel.
Ideally yes, but unfortunately even if Biden does want to do that, existing US doctrine won't allow it. Israel is basically Americas proxy in the middle east and protects "American interests" in the region from traditionally Russian backed states like Egypt and Iran.
Then there's all the more kooky stuff like the amount of important and rich people in the US that are either zionists themselves, are Christian zionists who belive Israel needs to exist to bring forth the second coming, or just simply have vested interests in the military industrial complex.
Which all make it so opposing Israels genocide extremely costly in terms of political capital.
Our doctrine is whatever we say it is. We control our foreign policy not the other way around. And if we let our previous policy set us up to support dictators and genocidal regimes then our kids are going to be reading about us in text books. Just like we read about our parent's generation doing that.
Come to think of it, the Silent Generation was in charge back then too. the fuck is going on with them?
Overdue.
Overdue, but still welcome. I'm gonna assume/pretend it was the less than stellar showing in Michigan that finally got to him.
Maybe, but going against Isreal has been political suicide up until now. The more protests, the easier it makes deviating from unconditional support, which again, has been unbroken US policy since the beginning of Isreal.
Add to that how important our foothold in Isreal is to the US both militarily and economically (in the form of ensuring the safety of shipping down the seas), it's a huge deal to go against Isreal.
So yeah, protests help give an excuse. It doesn't mean it's changed anyone's minds on the morality of it all, but that it frees them to actually act on something previously untouchable.
Israel's popularity has been dropping like a hot rock since the age of social media. But this was even worse. 50% of Americans think Israel has gone too far and another 35% think it's okay but they shouldn't keep going. Israel really screwed up.
And, in a roundabout way, you can thank the Electoral College. Because if the popular vote was all that counted, he might decide that the 100k votes in Michigan were worth staying uncommitted so he could pick up the pro-Israel lobby elsewhere, like on Long Island and in NYC. But Biden is all but guaranteed to win NY, while Michigan is a toss-up.
Florida also has a sizable Jewish population, but the former swing state has turned red from an influx of retirees over the past several election cycles.
If by "influx of retirees" you mean "even worse systemic election tampering than there already was", then yes.
The majority of the people in Florida aren't Republicans. Only the majority of the people the Republicans allow to vote.
A mass migration of Northeasterners and Midwesterners into Florida, many of them conservatives leaving Democratic states, has led to the state's politics turning sharply to the right, experts say.
"The notion of the 'Big Sort' ... is really proving itself," said Matt Isbell, a Democratic elections analyst. "That's the idea that people move based on the politics. ... For a lot of retirees, places like Florida are appealing, especially if they're already conservative."
Many of those new residents may have been attracted to Florida because they see it as a right-leaning state, said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, especially amid Gov. Ron DeSantis' opposition to almost all COVID-19 restrictions.
But it also goes the other way ... "If you're a liberal retiree up in the Northeast, if you're Jewish retiree in New York City right now, you see this stuff out of Florida, the Nazis and stuff, do you really think you're going to come down here?" Isbell said.
What that article fails to mention is that the number of people kept from voting under one pretense or the other completely dwarfs the number of people moving to Florida from other states.
For example, a few years ago, the people of Florida voted to restore voting rights to convicted felons wo had served their time and thus paid their debt to society. The GOP reacted by imposing likely unconstitutional financial conditions, effectively re-disenfeanchising almost 775k of them for being too poor to pay for their own incarceration and enslavement.
That's more than two and a half times as many as the total population increase of Florida last year,including births, adults moving to the state who are NOT GOP voters etc.
Then you add the fact that traditionally democratic big cities have too few polling places by design and more people who can't take the several hours it takes to stand in line to vote in a red state city without losing their income, incurring childcare costs they can't afford or both.
Then you have all the people who were struck from voter rolls, more than 3 times as many as the total population increase, a probable majority of which were likely Dem voters struck without a valid reason.
All in all, elderly Republicans moving to Florida is a bucket of water compared to the ocean that is Republican voter suppression.
And Latin-American conservative immigrants
Damn that electoral college. Doing something good every so often.
After giving us W and Trump, it's got a lot of making up to do.
The idea of the Electoral College makes more sense when you consider it to be the weighted average of 50 elections. It keeps elections confined to a state-by-state event. Imagine the shit show if we had a full popular vote, and a candidate won by 5 votes, so the entire country got recounted?
But having the Electoral College be actual people is silly. And it's weighted all wrong, because the House hasn't expanded in 100+ years. Maybe if the House were twice it's size, things might be more representative.
There is an actual algorithm to determine House apportionment based on the population in the 50 states. One of these days, I want to take the time to figure out if Trump would still have won if the House were twice the size in 2016, or whether that would have skewed the weightings just enough for Clinton to have won.
Your statement about recounts makes no sense. We can still hold elections on a state by state basis, and determine the winner via popular vote. That would not require a full 50 state recount. It would require individual recounts in states where the votes were within the recount margin. This is precisely what the National Popular Interstate Vote Compact is attempting to do right now, and what should have been done long ago.
I was curious, Someone did it. (Close) https://qz.com/865380/to-fix-the-electoral-college-increase-the-size-of-the-house-of-representatives
Doesn't move the needle enough in their estimate.
In Federalist 68, Hamilton gave some reasoning as to why the Electoral College exists. Now, I think the Federalist papers should be treated with some care. They're often post-facto attempts at justifying committee decisions when that committee had been sitting in meetings all day and just signed off on something. That's very likely what happened with the Electoral College.
That said, the explicit reasoning in Fed68 was to stop someone like Trump:
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest That which is best administered is best,'' yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.
Additionally, it's also justifying decisions in light of pro-royalist critics (both foreign and domestic) who said democracy was a trap and the rabble can't be trusted to decide on their leaders. As a result, the Constitution doesn't go all in on democracy, and you have this stuff above about one of these not-quite-democratic mechanisms are meant to prevent a populist dullard from gaining the office.
Those royalist critics are all but extinct now, but we're stuck with some of the things designed to counter their objections.
Since then, the US has put in several measures undoing some of the not-quite-democratic stuff. For example, universal suffrage, President and Vice President elected as a pair, senators elected by the popular vote of their state, and the parties having primaries instead of appointing candidates. It's been an improvement for the common people at every step of the way. Fledgling democracies looking for how to structure their government have largely not chosen to repeat the mistakes of the US; not even one's the US itself helped setup, like Germany, Japan, and Iraq. They've preferred European-style parliamentary systems.
So we've got this Electoral College thing that, at best, is there to counter arguments nobody makes any more, and at worst, was rubber stamped by a committee that wanted to go home for the day. It's shit, and it needs to go.
Still is overdue.
We blocked yet another thing in the UN from criticizing Israel.
I understand that it's a really hard situation to navigate through. It's not easy to just unilaterally go against a long term ally overnight. It's a horrible situation that I'd hate to be in charge of.
Look who wants to get reelected!
Haven’t heard as much from people who were supporting Israel at the beginning of the war. I think that means some of them have realized Israel went a bit too far.
Try r/worldnews. Whatever it is that is happening there, it isn't very palatable.
I'll believe it when he actually does something about it. So far it's just been talk and allegedly looking frustrated.
I mean, that was certainly true a week ago, but they've definitely started doing something now. They're dropping aid on Gaza, Harris is calling for a ceasefire, and they invited Benny Gantz, who will probably be Netanyahu's next opponent for Prime Minister, to the White House. The aid drops are not sufficient, and the calls for a ceasefire have come far too late, but the Gantz thing is actually pretty great. Polls show Gantz would beat Netanyahu if there were an election today, and apparently this has seriously undermined him politically.
I'm very critical of Israel and the Democrats' enablement of it's genocide, and I have no illusions about the White House's motives here; the only reason Biden's doing anything is because he's scared shitless by the 100K uncommitted voters in Michigan. But Biden isn't just letting staffers leak that he called Netanyahu a, "bad fucking guy," anymore, he's taking actual action. You can argue that what he's doing isn't enough (God knows I think it's not enough), but we should acknowledge and encourage positive changes, even if they're small and insufficient.
Article is paywalled.
Here is an Archived Version.
Biden should never have said U.S. aid to Israel was unconditional. As the death toll of innocents from Israel's operations in Gaza quickly grew intolerably high, the U.S. should have slammed on the brakes, publicly condemned (rather than defended) Israel's actions, stopped military aid to Israel, demanded a ceasefire, supported efforts for a ceasefire in international institutions and begun aggressive aid measures for Gaza including sending a hospital ship and finding ways to deliver aid to Gaza via the sea.
Halfway measures like the sanctioning of West Bank settlers seem impotent. Dropping a few tens of thousands of meals to Gazans, given the scale of the crisis being faced, is little more than a gesture. It also put the U.S. in the position of supporting both sides in this war. That does not send the message that our approach is balanced. It makes it clear that it has been, best intentions aside, incoherent.
People who possess a modicum of decency or care about the people of Gaza or Israel or the region should hope the U.S. moves more quickly and decisively to a different policy – one that shows a policy guided more by wisdom, compassion, realism and genuine loyalty rather than one focused on superficial displays of misplaced support.
Thank you
Can't get around the paywall. Is this something that hasn't been reported elsewhere?
It’s an opinion piece. It summarizes some relevant events but is not new reporting.
If only he would try and find who is supplying them with the weapons.
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