Progressives acknowledging the fact of genocide is a good first step, and it’s useful that Ocasio-Cortez and others have done so — “I think [unconditional aid to Israel] enabled a genocide in Gaza,” she said in Munich — but it is not in and of itself sufficient. Before anyone in the party can move on to selling a post-Biden vision of human-rights-first foreign policy, they must address what accountability for the war criminals in the Biden administration — those who aided, armed, and funded genocide — should look like.
You must take lessons in how to miss the point and dodge the question while responding to something that no one said, to argue against something no one claimed.
It’s not just about third-party voters, it’s also about non-voters. Not people who can’t vote, and only partly about people who aren’t registered to vote. It’s about registered voters who didn’t vote, either because they were lazy, busy, didn’t have transportation, or because they were deliberately boycotting the vote. More registered voters abstained in 2024 than there were voters for either candidate.
Laziness can only be addressed with civics education. Busyness can be addressed by making election day a federal holiday and making it illegal for employers to schedule double-shifts that day for businesses that are open. Transportation can be addressed by bolstering public transit infrastructure and adding state-funded shuttle services on election day.
The boycotters can only be addressed by convincing people to ignore all the anti-election propaganda which is being peddled on social media. If leftists actually believe in harm reduction, they would understand why voting for Kamala Harris would have been magnitudes better than allowing trump to win…
Please, spare me with your pedantic, pedagogical narcissism. The only ones in this room who need lessons are the ones who insist on an approach to electoralism which has consistently, repeatedly failed to actually win elections.
Lets just take your institutionally ignorant approaches as an example:
Its August of 2024. You have 3 months until election day. NOTHING you outline could be accomplished on that timeline, so its UTTERLY FUCKING MEANINGLESS.
That’s not why people don’t vote you fucking moron. They didn’t vote because the candidate was pro-genocide. They TOLD You why. YOU didn’t think it was important that Democrats provide an option that people WANTED to vote for, so people didn’t vote. They told you why they didn’t vote. Stop making up reasons that aren’t borne out by reality.
So anyone who disagrees with you is a narcissist? Projection much? Narcissists and their DARVO, I guess. Thanks for telling on yourself.
I was calling out your strawman. You were arguing against an argument that was different from the one the commenter you replied to was making. Sorry not sorry you’re not emotionally stable enough to handle that.
I never claimed it could be fixed by this year’s elections (it’s 2026, by the way). I simply acknowledged those things as part of the problem and stated how they can be addressed. It’s obviously longer-term thinking than you seen willing or capable of engaging in. I included it for completeness.
Over 70 million registered voters abstained in 2024. More than either parties received in votes. That’s not simple policy disagreement, that’s the result of a coordinated anti-election cyber campaign, which the kremlin openly admits to doing.
And I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to say this, but Kamala Harris’s passive support for Israel when the shock of Oct 7 was still fresh was completely different from trump’s active promotion of genocidal rhetoric. The Palestinians would be better off today if Kamala Harris had won, and if you deny that then you’re the moron you accuse me of being.
If you knew how to vote strategically, with pragmatism and realpolitik in mind, and valued harm reduction, you would have understood that preventing a second trump presidency was more important than protesting the DNC’ chosen candidate by boycotting the election completely. Time and place, man.
You don’t know what I think is important, so stop making assumptions. What was important was keeping trump out of the white house, as anyone who’s watching things play out now should be able to tell.
The reality being born out is that trump is president, Gaza is now a parking lot, and he plans to turn it into a riviera. He not only passively allows Israel to do whatever they want, but he actively supports and encourages them to. US and Israel are starting an unnecessary war with Iran. The US has been threatening its allies and trade partners, and ICE thugs are abducting people (including children) on the streets of the US and holding them in concentration camps, frequently even murdering people in broad daylight and getting away with it.
But you allowed all this to happen because you thought Kamala Harris would somehow be worse for the world? Spare me.
You are a narcissist because your arguments are utterly self serving. None of them contribute to the candidate actually getting a different outcome in the election. They serve as an analgesic to cope with the fact that you advocate for strategies that explicitly list the election.
There is no straw man because we’re not talking about magical scenarios that didn’t happen or anything else other than one specific election that happened in 2024.
Ok. Then it’s completely fucking irrelevant and doesn’t belong in this conversation because we’re not talking about anything other than what it was going to take to get a Democrat elected as president in 2024.
Americans have always always voted at about the rate we saw in 2024. There is no evidence for any widespread voter fraud. Nothing about the voting in 24 was abnormal. I’ve seen no evidence that anything Russia did was even worth mentioning in 24. I guess if you get all your news from right wing Blue MAGA rags, maybe the narrative is different.
I do however, know one specific country, Israel, which spent HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS, in influencing the US election. Who lobbied Congress and the White House directly, to keep them maintaining a pro genocide position, one deeply unpopular with Democrats, and marginally unpopular with Republicans.
This is why I call you a narcissist, because the narcissist will only ever believe themselves, not what the people who do the things actually tell them.
The voters litterally told you what their issue was 11 months before the election. They repeatedly told you the genocide in Gaza was their highest priority. They shut down Columbia campus about it. They organized write in campaign to say they couldn’t support a Democratic candidate for office who supported a genocide. They told you what it was going to take to win the election, and you, the narcissist, decided that what your thoughts and comfort were more important.
And as far as inferring your intent, you telling me what you think in these comments. You are telling me what you think is important. I’m not making assumptions, I’m listening to the thing you tell me you think are important and explaining to you that in the context of an election, the things you think are important might not be the most important things required to win an election.
Oh, I thought my opposition to trump was based on concern for the world and the marginalized and underprivileged groups in the US. But if you know me better than I do, then I guess the reason I oppose trump is because I’m a self-serving narcissist? Weird. I would have thought that if that were true, I would have supported trump like all the other self-serving narcissists in America. Hmmm…
If people who decided to boycott the vote over Gaza decided instead to get over themselves and their ideological purism, then trump would have lost and the people in Gaza would be faring substantially better than they are now. You continue to gloss over that fact because you need “an analgesic to cope with the fact that you advocate for strategies” that explicitly gave the election to trump.
I included it for the sake of completeness to address the potential counterarguments that “Not every registered voter who abstained was doing so as a boycott over Gaza.” It’s basic intellectual honesty, but if that’s irrelevant to you then we know what sort of position you’re arguing from. So thanks for telling on yourself.
False. 2024 had abysmally poor turn-out relative to registered voters.
Also false. Elon Musk openly
admitted tobragged about interfering with election integrity. The 2024 elections were also never audited, unlike 2020, so if there were anomalies (which some have been identified, particularly in blue districts of swing states), they haven’t been investigated or officially reported.Interfering in western nations’ elections is standard russian foreign policy. They don’t even try to hide it.
That’s not where I get my news, but good try.
Oh yeah, no one is denying that here. Go ahead and ask yourself who Israel was spending all that money to get elected? Doesn’t exactly help your argument.
Again, you still seem to be telling on yourself.
Do you think I’m the fucking DNC or something? I have my preferences for candidates and policies, but those took a back seat in 2024 to the main effort of preventing a second trump term, which you continue to gloss over as a factor in that election. I’m capable of putting my personal preferences aside for a higher priority like that because, unlike you, I’m not a narcissist.
Nope. I told you that what I thought was important in 2024 was making sure trump didn’t get elected. You assumed everything else about my position.
Beyond my opposition to trump, I haven’t mentioned my personal opinions because those aren’t what matter. If you really want to know, I’m a leftist, but not the kind that unthinkingly follows whatever the puristic campism of your average tankie circlejerk tells you to believe.
I believe in socialist fiscal policy, as well as a legal system based on restorative justice a la Rawls and Sen, and a political system based on direct democracy, regional autonomy, and a constitutional rules-based order to preserve sovereignty while encouraging multilateral cooperation and ensuring respect for human rights. But all that is as good as the paper it’s written on. I also recognize the complexities of realpolitik and can subordinate my personal ideology to the pragmatism of a feasible political strategy in favor of incremental progress through gradual change; and at times, harm reduction and damage control. Because nothing is going to become perfect overnight, and everything depends on the changing tides of public sentiment and shifting political tailwinds.
More relevant to this conversation, I think Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank are atrocious, and world leaders need to take a hardline stance against it, but I recognize that that won’t be possible under trump.
So there. Now you no longer need to assume more than you actually know.