this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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she continues to be vague about her policy on stopping the genocide in Gaza, and that's all I needed to hear, personally.
EDIT: well I got y'all talkin, and that was my main mission.
And that's as clear as she got the whole time. As least she was answering the question asked in that case.
(As to single-issue Gaza voters, I get it in the "had a close friend who was Palestinian in my 20s" sense, but Trump doesn't give a shit about the Palestinians. Somehow suggesting she's the worse choice in this race on that issue alone isn't even true, regardless of the larger picture. That's not politics or conjecture.)
Politicians are notoriously evasive, and this particular interview sounded more straight forward than most. Okay, most the honest ones, anyway. I mean: it's easy to say "Read my lips. No new taxes" or "Free IVF" if you've no legitimate plan to fund the government, but if you're not going to make stuff up for the sound bite, you almost have to be evasive. Robust and well considered plans are made by experts and a politician trying to promote a good plan has to boil it down to a couple nebulous basics. Doing anything else means you either bore the audience OR skip a contingency or other minutia such that your critics call you a liar.
Remember when Obama said you'd get to keep your doctor? He was trying to summarize explaining that Affordable Care would not mandate what doctor you could use, but what he didn't say was that Insurance Companies would continue to be able choose what doctors they covered, so Obama's critics said he LIED about keeping your doctor. It was NOT a lie. It was just Insurance companies doing what they always did.
Harris said she would support Israel but the war had to end. If Israeli/Palestinian strife has gone unsolved for 50 years through all sorts of Presidents, I don't expect any U.S. election to change what goes on over there. The U.S. could theoretically stop aiding Israel as it commits genocide, but the realistic outcome of that would be neighboring countries committing genocide on Israelis, and since that's the basic reason the country was invented... maybe that's not the best outcome either. It has been a mess for decades, and I'm not blaming Regan, Carter, Trump, Putin, or Tony Blair for any of the mess with Gaza.
Harris said she would not ban fracking but her values have not changed. I suspect this is because she's come to see no one banned horses when car came along, and no one need ban fracking if there's a better alternative. What she did not specify was the carrots and sticks she might employ to get us to which alternatives. That's fine with me because the tech is changing and the outcome is more important than the method.
Harris said she would enforce laws regarding immigration AND she wanted the tabled border bill on her desk so she can sign it. There's a bunch she could have said there, too, but my point is that again, she wasn't particularly evasive.
Israel is so armed to the teeth at this point, i'm not sure how you think they would just be sitting ducks without the US's support. And honestly at this point I kind of feel like they deserve whatever happens to them in the absence of US aid. 17,000 dead children is a lot of blood to wash off.
Given that Israel has nuclear weapons, they wouldn't be 'sitting ducks', but I don't want to see a nuclear war starting in the Middle East. I doubt it would stay contained to the area. I fear that Russia would back Iran and counter -- or at least threaten to -- with Russian nuclear weapons, which would get the U.S. or our allies back into the mess but escalated to the whole world at risk instead of just a small contested sliver.
I would love to see a workable path to a two-state solution. Experts have spent their lives working towards that goal and it still hasn't happened. I totally blame the government of Israel for not figuring out a peace with Palestinian residents back in the 1970s, but here we are. Bibbi makes everything worse and his public falls for his 'strong man' shtick just like Americans fall for Trump's version. Sitting in the U.S., the best election choice I can make for the sake of Palestinians is to vote Harris. Beyond the election, there is room for letters, protests, and boycotts, but the problem is mostly with Israel's government rather than with anyone in the United States.
I actually think you're slightly wrong about this. She isn't the worse choice on this issue, because they are functionally identical on this issue. If we have 17,000 dead Palestinian children due to Biden-Harris foreign policy, does it really matter that Trump foreign policy might have led to 20,000+ dead Palestinian children? It's an unconscionable tragedy either way.
If you don't care about any dead child above 17,000, you've made a fine argument. But now you're saying more deaths is fine (and better than current policy) because you've reached some tipping point where more suffering and death is actually preferable to ... what? A Democrat in the White House? Your logic doesn't work within your own argument.
This is very common among single-issue voters. As another example: abortion. Plenty of people who think Trump is heinous vote for him based on that issue alone (something the GOP has been using to great effect for the past 30 years), and accept whatever else his cronies get him to enact because they perceive him as "wanting to get rid of abortion."
If your think the suffering of Palestinians is the greatest domestic issue facing the U.S., dwarfing all others combined, by all means let it guide your choice. But don't complain about the internment camps that start getting built if Trump wins when you found everything else in this election irrelevant.
Six hundred Nader votes in Florida going to Gore instead 24 years ago would have put this country on a very different trajectory, so it is not hyperbole that staying home or voting for the other guy can result in an even worse outcome.
I did not say this. I said that 20,000 deaths is "functionally equivalent" to 17,000, not "preferable". Big difference in meaning. My point is that the two candidates are identical on this specific issue.
Well it's a foreign issue, not a domestic one. But that aside, I am aware of and care about the other issues. It just strikes me as selfish to focus on what will happen to us if Trump wins when people elsewhere in the world are being slaughtered, and the "morally good" alternative supports that slaughter.
Look, I been around the block. I voted third party in 2016 and saw what came of that. I'm utilitarian about this at the end of the day, and I want to choose the candidate that will cause the least total suffering in the world as whole. I want the Overton Window in the US to shift left, and I think that happens through repeated Dem wins. But don't get it twisted: the Dems are still the party that will throw you a few social justice crumbs so you don't complain about being ground up by the gears of capitalism. They bypassed the primary process and stole your voice from you so they could choose the moderate candidate that they wanted.
And ultimately, I hate that the Dems have so successfully-whipped y'all into a panic about Trump that y'all won't even DISCUSS this genocide anymore for fear that it will lead to a second Trump presidency. Watch them do it again with a new bogeyman in 4 years.
To your last point, you're dead wrong. I'm not whipped into anything, but thanks for the personal attack (not just on me, but on the gestures broadly "y'all") with zero basis. That's not Beehaw etiquette.
I'm far to the left of the current U.S. Overton window, so being cast as aligned with neoliberalism is laughable. As far as I can tell, your argument is that everyone for whom Gaza isn't their only deciding factor in a U.S. election supports genocide. That's certainly an opinion.
I didn't think I was making a personal attack, but I'm sorry if it came off that way. In spaces like this, I'm usually trying to stick to only expressing my POV without saying anything specific about anyone that isn't a public figure. I know I can get a bit heated, tho. Sorry if I overstepped in my language, I have no bad blood for any Beeple.
Thanks for the explanation and apology. No harm done ... using the second person when talking about contentious issues can be pretty fraught, so I just wanted to let you know how I received it.