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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24130 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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I'm seeing a consistent stream of content from people these days decrying Biden and saying that they're not going to vote for the Democratic party in the election. This is one example:

Voting for Biden is letting the Democratic Party know you are okay with them not raising the min wage to a living wage. It's letting them know you are okay with record military budgets while homelessness spiked 12% in one year and that you are OK with sending billions of dollars in US bombs and bullets to Israel to blow the heads and limbs off little children and babies while leveling 70% of Gaza. Sometimes in a democracy, the strongest word you can say is NO.

Here's another:

You don't have to choose between genocide and a felon.

And here's a tweet indicating that voting for the Green Party is not the same as voting Republican:

If I cast my vote for the Green Party ... my vote does not go to the Republican. We'll go over this again tomorrow

This sort of thing seemed to start around the time the Israel-Palistine culture war heated up and I haven't really seen it stop. I've even seen one that says that our choices for November are basically Voldemort and Palpatine.

This may just be coming from social-media acquaintances of mine and just the sources they follow (I have a lot of really leftist acquaintances), and may not be representative of the general populace. I really don't know.

I find this interesting for a few reasons.

  1. I somehow find this sort of thing even more annoying than pure Trump bashing, because it's showing me that absolutely nothing will be enough for these people. They seem to think they're entitled to a purely leftist president who agrees with them on everything, and anything right of that makes him evil.
  2. This is the exact opposite of the rhetoric I remember from 4 years ago. Everyone was rallying around the ideas that "we need to stop fascism (read: Trump)" and "it's okay to choose the lesser of two evils, as long as we depose Trump" and "a vote for a third party is akin to voting for Trump". Make no mistake, the people saying they're not voting for Biden in 2024 were the exact same people I saw making these "lesser of two evils" statements last time around.
  3. I think the group fervor and group commitment to all voting for Biden no matter what because they believed it was the only right thing to do, was a lot of the reason why Trump lost in 2020. I wonder if this severe disillusionment with Biden to the point of public denouncement really will hurt his chances in November. Maybe the people I see making these statements are just virtue signaling "look I'm so progressive, even the Democratic president isn't progressive enough for me". Or maybe not. But even if they are virtue signaling and they don't really mean it, they could easily influence others, and the break in the group fervor could have huge consequences.

My baseline assumption for pseudonymous tweets is that it's all Russian troll farms. None of it means anything.

Yes, I had the same thought, this is very much just exactly the divisive stuff you'd expect Russia and Iran to push as much as possible. There are of course people who lap up the narrative and horrific images, the propaganda wing isn't so incompetent not to get some organic opposition with access to dead children and an organization happy to putting their children in the kind of danger that produces fresh horrific images.

organization happy to putting their children in the kind of danger that produces fresh horrific images.

Are you claiming that Palestinians moved to Palestine just to make sure their children could die in order to win propaganda victories? The Palestinians didn't actually migrate to Palestine or Gaza just recently in order to make Israel look bad - they've been in the region for quite a while.

No, I'm saying hamas purposefully colocates military targets with civilians knowing that this will inevitably end up with dead Palestinian civilians which they record and use in propaganda.

Do they actually have any kind of choice? I don't believe that Israel would be terribly accepting of an official Hamas Military outpost showing up anywhere in Gaza.

Do they actually have any kind of choice? I don't believe that Israel would be terribly accepting of an official Hamas Military outpost showing up anywhere in Gaza.

Yes, they obviously have a choice. They've got an extremely extensive underground network, there's very little reason they couldn't have most of their military hardware there. While they're at it, they could open up their tunnels for civilians to shelter in rather than say it's not their responsibility to look after them.

It's not like the possibilities end there. They could choose to keep kids away from "schools" jam-packed with weapons and firing facilities. The hit to the kids' education is probably compensated for by their subsequently increased life-expectancy. They could store military hardware in apartment blocks that actual civilians are forbidden from living in. And so on.

They could unconditionally surrender. That's what I'd do if I found myself having started a war with a superior power despite having no actual army. Their other choices are set up shop where civilians aren't and get immediately destroyed or keep up what they're doing and getting their people killed. They've taken that option and are responsible for the obvious consequences.

Well then they have two moral options:

  1. Get good.

  2. Stop setting up military outposts until you get good.

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