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Which is insane given that the man to whom he'd lose would be far worse for Palestineans...
The only way it makes sense is if the people who'd not vote over Israel don't actually care about Palestineans so much as being on the "right"/socially cool side of the issue. Otherwise not voting for Biden over trump because of Israel is like refusing to ride home with your friend because they had a beer and instead hopping in the car with the guy who was slamming tequila all night.
This is it. Politics is messy, and people don't want to get their hands dirty making a hard choice.
I think those people would think that defending Biden from critique over Palestine is more of an indication of not caring than protesting against it by threatening not to vote for him.
If it was just critique, people wouldn't be genuinely planning not to vote for him, handing Trump the win. It's textbook cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I'm certain there are some who feel like it's just people who don't care (and in most cases, they're wrong), but the rest have such a myopic view of the world—they're gonna be the ones to stop Biden and remain morally superior—that they forget there's more at stake than just Gaza, such as LGBTQ rights to exist, freedom from religion, and continuing democracy.
And if it was just critique (absent any threat of action), then there'd be no pressure for dialogue (which is why leftists regard liberals to be functionally the same as reactionaries, btw). It should be alarming to everyone here if Biden is willing to risk 'handing Trump the win' in order to avoid taking a firm stance against Israel's genocide in Gaza.
People claim they want to work for change, but often prove unwilling to exercise what little power they have to push for it. You're right though; if Biden proves unwilling to concede on issues that are non-negotiable to some of us, then people will be forced to look elsewhere to pressure that change, and what and where that looks like really remains to be seen. So far, two people have self-immolated in protest of the US's involvement in the Palestinian genocide. I think we should all be very concerned about what further actions people will take if the Biden administration continues their unconditional support of Israel, the least of which should be who ends up voting in november.
Yes. Is correct that liberal voters want Palestine enough to support trump. And this is right because trump is a strong leader such as Putin who alone can bring Palestine away from the evil Democratic Joe Biden.
Many people have been saying to not vote in order to show support for peace, and this is correct view. Also many of my texting friends are agreeing with me and I am a person with the sexually pronouns so that is true. I also work in unions and am woman of color.
It seems very much to me like people trying to keep some ideal of purity for themselves, and if someone who unironically says, "genocide Joe" would care to correct me I'm listening, but it's unclear how letting the guy who changed the us stance on settlements being unlawful to being totally cool win because of your unwillingness to recognize that this world is actively on fire, and we have to live with whatever future we steer to regardless.
"If you decide not to decide, you still have made a choice."
Are you really expecting someone who lost relatives in Gaza to vote for the guy who had the power to do something about it and didn't?
This campaign is telling Biden that there's a voting block that holds the balance of power in a swing state, and all he has to do to get their votes is pick up the phone, tell Bibi to wrap it up or he gets no more weapons (and yes, it is that simple. Reagan did it when Israel invaded Lebanon).
But instead of meeting voters where they are, Democrats seem to fall back to their usual MO of blaming voters, instead of winning votes by doing things that are popular with voters.
It makes them feel better to think it's just online leftists doing purity politics rather than a deeply angered population who have been giving him every opportunity to turn away from this and mostly just treated as an inconvenience.
It's either online purity politics or damn near zero understanding of consequences.
"I don't like what Biden didn't do for Palestinias, I'm going to help someone who would be way worse for Palestinians! Yay!"
If I shoot your son and explain credibly why the other guy would have also shot your daughter, that’s a cold comfort.
To be clear, you're choosing the guy who'd shoot both?
I’m explaining why people don’t want to choose either, because both of them will kill their children.
Unfortunately, failing to choose means choosing the worse option.
Though, had all the young pro Palestine leftists bothered to show up during the 2020 or 2016 primaries, there might be a more progressive president and thus a better set of choices. Unfortunately, showing up to the primaries seems anathema to the under 30 crowd, hence, two terrible choices.
You may not like it, but that’s democracy- even progressive people you wish would vote for Biden might not, even if it means trump wins. Some of them are accelerationists who will vote for Trump directly, no matter how ill advised that may be.
And that's their right!
BUT, to complain about the effects of their own choices is absurd.
"I made a conscious decision to not vote progressive and now a centrist politician is enacting centrist policies with entirely predictable outcomes! How could this have happened?!?"
Luckily the people in this article are making their voices heard, looking for a more progressive option. I think people will complain no matter who gets voted in, especially if a person they didn’t vote for won. But I don’t know that people who are voting against Biden because of Palestine will wish he had won if trump wins, I think they might wish Biden had taken this hint and acted differently, but that’s not the same thing.
And if they'd done so in the primaries, that change might have done some good for Palestineans.
Not the same thing to us rich westerners, no. And it's not the same to the Palestineans who would suffer worse with a trump presidency.
This position makes zero sense. If you give a damn about Palestineans and the worse option wins, how could you not wish the better option had won?
The folks considering not voting either don't actually give a damn about Palestinean well being or are mind bogglingly counter productive.
There is no universe in which someone is simultabeously: a) genuinely concerned about Palestineans B) considering not voting Biden because of Palestine and C) has at least the intelligence of a turnip.
This is the primary.
I don’t think you understand how bad things are under Biden- would you actually vote for someone under whose approval your relative thirsted to death? If so, congratulations on your compartmentalization ability. That would be essentially endorsing those actions and many, many people aren’t able to do that.
Against an incumbent. The meaningful primaries were 2020, 2016.
"My relative died, who cares if my choices actively make things worse for those who are still alive?"
Sucks to have that sociopath as a relative I guess.
That lacks basic empathy.
I know! It is, at best, sociopathic to deliberately make things worse for people you claim to care about.
Very clever. I mean that you are demonstrating no empathy for people who have lost a great deal.
You're infantalizing these people.
We both agree on these two facts right:
So, the question really is do you think so little of these folks that you think they can't comprehend those basic facts? Do you believe they are incapable of simple logic? Or do you think they are sociopaths? Or do you actually think they are disingenuous about their feelings for Palestineans?
Out of the two of us, I'm the only one dignifying these people as functional, albeit grieving, adults. If you'd ever had to deal with the mountains of paperwork following an unexpected death you'd know that grief doesn't turn you into a child.
We don’t agree on those two facts.
I don’t know if I truly believe there will be Palestinians by next January, so I don’t know if trump could be worse for them. If he takes office, he might be more enthusiastic, but I don’t think Netanyahu will stop as long as someone in the White House supports him. When Biden does it while holding his nose, it’s not less useful support.
Not voting may help trump or Biden, depending on your jurisdiction.
Oh boy, those are some pretty silly arguments. I can see why you're supporting this nonsense then.
Unless what, you think Bibbi is going to start dropping nukes? Really?
You’re rude to me too! How fun. This is my last reply.
I absolutely see the escalation that has already occurred from each month to the next and understand how things could get much worse, much more quickly, without nuclear bombs (think about Dresden).
A progressive voter in a solid blue area who will not vote for Biden but may have voted in this primary could absolutely help him by not voting for a third party candidate.
Except, Dresden had a population of 600,000 and lost ~ 25000 people and many folks lived there throughout and after the war. Just like Palestinians will. And of course, if you read the news you'd know that Israel aims to have the bulk of their boots on the ground phase before the summer.
This is just silly. You might as well say Biden is actually helping Palestinians by not having the American military bomb Gaza.
I think at this point, you know how nonsensical your position is, you just don't have the maturity to admit it. At least, I hope that's what's up. Because these are truly childish arguments and if this nonsense is what we on the left have to offer then we deserve to lose elections.
People have outright stated to me that they are doing purity politics. While I cannot prove that every single person I suggest is likely doing so, is actually doing so, I am not making such claims in a vacuum.
You took a handful of anecdotes from your online life and decided "I understand the electorate"? Do you think ~15% of Michigan is online leftists?
Any excuse necessary to continue support for genocide. It's interesting to see the very first policy centrists don't immediately abandon when they encounter pressure.
I took a handful of anecdotes from my online life and decided that people I encounter online have a decently high probability of being more examples of the same thing.
So, first:
No, I do not expect someone who lost relatives in Gaza to vote for the person they blame for it. Humans are creatures of emotion first and logic second, and the vast majority of people won't be able to divorce themselves from their emotional state to do the expected value math. That doesn't mean that, by letting Trump win, they will be doing something other than permitting more people to get massacred faster.
Are you aware that the administration has been pushing on them to not do the shit they've been doing? It seems to me like the answer to that is no, and you expect Biden to just declare terms to a country half a world away which has quite a lot of weapons already, up to and including nuclear arms, I think. Israel is capable of producing weapons on their own. Today isn't 40 years ago.
Biden has done many things that are popular, but people are poorly informed. How much student debt has Biden forgiven, off the top of your head and without consulting the internet?
They haven't been pushing hard enough. The US gives Israel billions in 'aid', and that is definitely leverage that they haven't been willing to use. They're just leaking stuff about Biden 'being frustrated with Netanyahu' and whatever, but there's no evidence of the US daring to touch aid, conditioning aid or even following the US' own laws regarding human rights when providing weapons (you might remember the state department employee who quit in protest over that).
They're just sitting by while Israel is blocking food aid and is preparing to commit a massacre in Rafah.
As for student loans: it's a lot less than what they could've done if they just did a blanket forgiveness, because of the asinine fear of forgiving the loans for someone that is somehow undeserving (like fictional billionaire's children who wouldn't have needed to take out loans to begin with).
A lot less than they could've done, if they just did a blanket forgiveness, and the conservative supreme court didn't strike it down like they struck down the 400b. Do you have any idea of the actual number, though? And how does that number compare to prior presidents? To the likely nonbiden outcomes of this election?
I agree that I want them to do more. This still is not a reason to let the guy who will make it so much worse into office. "This meal wasn't good enough, so I'm going to burn the house down," is not a rational perspective.
The department of education has the simple authority to forgive loans, a process they're using right now (with a huge bureaucratic overhead of means testing, using loan servicers, etc).
For whatever reason they initially decided to try and use the heroes act instead, after declaring that the pandemic was 'over'. So of course the Supreme Court struck it down.
They could've just told the education secretary to forgive everyone's loans from the start. Or set the interest rates to 0% for everyone (as it's really the compound interest that's killing everyone).
Are you aware that your fanfic about what Biden is doing behind the scenes isn't evidence of anything?
Someone said Biden feels real bad about the genocide, it must be true. Just because Biden gave Israel 14 billion in fast track funding without congressional approval doesn’t mean he is pro genocide. He called Natanyahu on the phone….. and said yes daddy, yes daddy! Ohhh. The left or the right nut daddy!
This statement is incredibly disrespectful to the people who are currently losing relatives in the 10s and 100s due to Biden's actions. Like hell they're not in this to be on the socially cool side of an issue shut the fuck up.
Due to Biden's actions, or due to the actions of the government of Israel on which Biden does not have a leash?
He literally does though. Israel only got this far because of unconditional US support.
Unconditional US support from 2021-2024 is what got Israel there? Are you of the view that if we dumped them completely, right now, Israel would collapse or have no ability to prosecute their war against the Palestinians? To the best of my understanding, this is not the case, and I do not believe Biden has the ability to flatly dump Israel singlehandedly; I believe we have treaties with them, which are the law of the US and would need to be nullified by congress, which is never happening, and cannot reasonably be laid exclusively at Biden's feet.
Not collapse, but they wouldn't be able to continue bombing Gaza to the ground. I can't find the source (Edit: But their reserves are too limited). They'd also need to actually think of their neighbors' responses to their actions (remember how Sisi threatened to go to war over Gaza until Blinken had a "talk" with him), but let's set that aside because it's not something Biden can control single-handedly.
Biden has been bypassing Congress to send them weapons, pressing Congress for Israeli aid and on top of all that defending them at the UN (preventing measures such as UN-led sanctions from taking place). These are things Biden could stop doing right now that would materially impact Israel's campaign in Gaza, and the fact that he's not doing that is causing him to hemorrhage voters.
So, I don't disagree that he's doing those things. I'd also rather he stop those things, and push in the other direction, in a vacuum. It is not obvious to me that sending them weapons right now actually has much impact on their ability to conduct their genocide, and I suspect that what he is doing here, which again, I'd prefer he not, is in service to...
Reciprocity is a strong drive in humans. Giving someone something, even something they don't need, puts them in a space to agree to your requests, more so than if you flatly made them. It may be that those efforts, dislikable as they are from the perspective of an individual voter such as you or I, may be part of the realpolitik of getting Israel to stand the fuck down and stop killing people what the hell is wrong with you all seriously please please please stop fucking killing people. Ahem. He's been ramping up the pushback publically, and I think that pushback is lagging the private pushback, with the intent to have a stronger bargaining position. I will admit that I have insufficient data to have a strong belief in this area, and I do in fact rate that a weak belief, but it's consistent with the evidence I have.
This universe sucks and we need to make it better. Throwing up our hands and letting the guy who will send US troops to shove Gazans into the ocean and hold them underwater is the opposite of making it better. The majority of probability mass in november rests on a Biden-Trump competition. Of those options, I prefer Biden. Not because he's perfect, but because I can see that in a competition between bad and worse, worse is worse. Shit sucks. Opting not to vote doesn't opt you out of that world.
So, they're going to help someone who would make it worse for the remaining relatives? That makes sense.