“we promise ;)”

Fair enough, all good. I’m leaving mine up because I think the point about the conflation of anti-zionism and anti-semitism being in itself antisemitic bears repeating.

oh no, statistics that challenge my world view! Quick, let’s not look into it at all and move the goal posts!

Could you at least try to engage in this discussion? Or maybe come up with any evidence supporting your world view?

The part of the electorate that benefits from fracking, an even bigger border wall, children in cages at the border, and genocide is not big enough to move the needle. Plus, anyone who looks at those issues and considers them important is much more likely to vote for Trump anyway. Her platform was regressive dog shit, and that’s why people didn’t vote for her (and the genocide of course).

You can continue with the strategy of blaming the voters, but look where that got you. Just from a completely pragmatic perspective, look where that got you. The past three cycles you keep running candidates no one’s excited about, on essentially republican platforms, with the main selling point being that they’re not Trump (which is a veiled threat, at best). You managed to beat Trump only two out of the three times, and you had a massive pandemic helping you with the one time you did beat him with this strategy.

Eh, you know what, maybe you’re right. Let’s run on an even more right wing platform four years from now (maybe we can be anti-trans or whatever to attract more moderate republicans, like the 0% we managed to attract this cycle), let’s tell the voters they’re awful people if they vote for the other side, and maybe this time it’ll work

Hear hear! I mean, how dare they not vote for the democrats? Don’t they know how this works? Do they think the parties are supposed to “earn” their votes by campaigning for policies that will benefit the electorate? That’s fucking childish!

They lost the election by running an essentially republican candidate. Fingers crossed for a progressive chair.

There’s about 100 million evangelical christians in the US, and a LifeWay poll in 2017 showed that about 80% essentially considered themselves zionists. That’s 80 million. There’s 15.8 million jews worldwide. So the non-Jewish zionists outweigh Jewish zionists by a fair margin. Heck, they outweigh the zionist and the non-zionist jews taken together by a beefy margin, even.

If you’re equating the Jewish people with zionism, or conflating being in favor of zionism as somehow being benevolent to the Jewish people as a whole, you are treating the Jewish people as a monolith and are yourself being anti-semitic. Zionism is perfectly compatible with anti-semitism (see for example all those anti-semitic christians who enthusiastically support zionism), and anti-zionism is in itself not anti-semitic (cf Jewish voice for peace).

So making “zionist” a slur has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with being anti-anti-semitic or not.

The same way I don’t think we should capitulate to framing “cracker” as a slur, or to framing “black lives matter” as a racist thing to say, I don’t think we should capitulate to framing things like “from the river to the sea” or “zionist” as antisemitic.

But, as a thought experiment, let’s indulge in this doublespeak trash. What is a good alternative? So far I’ve got:

• Israeli colonizers
• Jewish supremacists
• genocidal sacks of shit
• Israeli apartheidists
• Isreal expansionists
• Israeli warmongerers
• people in favor of the genocide and apartheid committed by Israel (in full, every time you need to say zionist)
• modern day nazis
• zionazis (technically not zionist!)

So all of this liberal crybaby nomenclature trash aside, I actually do think “zionist” is in itself a fairly useless term for the Israeli apartheid question (as Norman Finkelstein and Judith Butler do too). While one faction of zionism pursued the nakba and massacres from fairly early on, and while this faction has been quite successful, there are other notions of zionism which do not entail murdering children or colonizing a country. When Netanyahu and Chomsky can both legitimately refer to themselves as zionists, I think it’s clear that zionism is too broad a term to be useful in the current ongoing genocide and the ethnic cleansing that has been going on for the better part of a century.

Oh my goodness you are in for a treat! Pourover coffee is in my opinion the best way to prepare a cup. Get yourself a v60, and the paper filters that go with it, watch a James Hoffman video on proper v60 technique, and enjoy. It should actually give a cleaner cup (less residue) than the French press.

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I totally agree, broken system and all. Still a free market. The free market is inherently a broken system.

If only someone had warned us in 1867, 1885, and 1894!

I completely agree with you that the results (monopolies and oligopolies) are undesirable, and you’re doing a great job of explaining why the results are undesirable. But you’re not explaining why you think monopolies and oligopolies are not the natural outcome of a free market. The free market is not a good thing.

What are you talking about, this is the natural conclusion of a free market.

Not probably. “Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children.” says the head of their air force.

I guess the point you’re making is that this essentially shows that Israel is targeting any palestinian, not just hamas. That’s genocide.

The definition of genocide according to the UN genocide convention consists of two parts. The first part is action which is subdivided into five subcategories:

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Ticking one of these boxes is enough to qualify for the action part. Certainly, Israel ticks the first box, probably the second, and if Yoav Gallant’s words are anything to go by, also the third:

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed, we are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly"

This quote is actually a nice segue into the second part of the definition of genocide, which is intent. Performing the actions outlined above only counts as genocide if it is done with the intention of destroying (in whole or in part) an ethnic, a religious, or national group. This is usually a bit harder to show. Not in this case though!

"“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware not involved. It’s absolutely not true. … and we will fight until we break their backbone.”

““there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza”

“The people should be told that they have two choices; to stay and to starve, or to leave”

These are all quotes from high placed Israeli officials (one of them is even president), all said in the context of justifying and directing the current attacks on Gaza. There’s many, many more, each more overt and disgusting than the last, outlined in South Africa’s 80 page document accusing Israel of genocide.

Back in december 2023 it was already indisputable that Israel is committing genocide. Even more so now. One more for good measure:

“Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children.”

I feel like you have a misconception about how democracy works. When there’s position that enjoys broad popular support (such as universal health care, or a cessation of the genocide in Gaza), it isn’t on the democrats to take that position so the electorate will vote for them, it’s on the electorate to either change their mind on the issue, or vote for the democrats regardless.

It’s important to internalize this lesson. Next cycle you’ll likely get to practice it with trans rights, if the talking heads on MSNBC who are blaming wokeness for the democrats losing the election are any indication. The idea that politicians and their policies are responsible for losing/winning elections is silly. You’re here for them, not the other way around.

Slow genocide is better