PhilipTheBucket

Certainly possible, most politicians are, I think. I was just saying that you wouldn't have to be some nutty apartheid-supporter to look at Rasoul's statement and have some objections to it.

Absolutely correct. So anyone who's doing that (or supporting it, making excuses for it, whatever), that's real fucked up and they're a bad person. I should have clarified, that type of broad category I'm fine with.

What I was saying is that someone who has been tirelessly advocating for the US to stop funding Israel, showing photos of the genocide and starvation on the senate floor, introducing votes to defund Israel, showing up at protests, all that kind of thing, if you manage to introduce a category of "Zionist" into the conversation, and then say "Well he's a Zionist so he's supporting genocide," that's a stupid way to reason. That's what I'm saying about broad categories. That type of broad category (using imprecise language to strategically make it sound like someone's supporting something they're not supporting) are useful tools for getting people confused.

On the other hand, he's an absolute fucking moron.

Trump is the fascism vaccine: He is the weakened form, so the system can learn about it, recognize it, and respond with no fuckin' around when it happens for real.

I'm not saying he is not dangerous. The camps are going up right now, and people packing into them every day. I'm just saying compared to what he could have been, we might have some kind of chance. Or I hope so at least.

Makes perfect sense.

Almost as if you can't look for morality or amorality in broad categories, and you need to look at what someone's actually doing (or advocating or whatever), and be specific.

!experimentalfilm@sh.itjust.works

Beastie Boys had one of the first and biggest of the anti-Iraq-War songs, I can't think offhand of one that was more "mainstream" at the time and still explicit and specific about it.

Well I'll be sleeping on your speeches 'til I start to snore
Cause I won't carry guns for an oil war
As-Salamu alaikum, wa alaikum as-salam
Peace to the Middle East peace to Islam

And so on. It might not have been the best (IMO that is "Empire" by Dar Williams, with haunting sadness, historical scope, and irony), but it was big.

A buddy of mine was leaning towards joining the military, and it was interacting with the recruiters and observing that they seemed miserable that changed his mind about it.

The pay is closer to $43k.

Oh, well in that case

Live by the mob of people whose might makes right and no one will stand against us or we'll fucking kill them, die a couple of years later hanging upside-down in a public square with people spitting on you. It's a pretty consistent rule. You would think they would notice the pattern after a while.

Absolutely lol. He's an Italian politician from the mid 20th century. I can pretty much guarantee that he has encyclopedic knowledge about prostitutes.

Many words have multiple, often contradictory and historically loaded meanings: "christianity", "socialism", "honour". What's weird about talking about them?

If somebody was writing about the "evils" of socialism, I would actually have exactly the same complaint about it for exactly the same reason. I would actually fully expect people to have precisely Tim Kaine's reaction to it, basically to say "Whoa WTF are you talking about, I am socialist, and I'm not evil." That's actually a pretty good example to explain what I am trying to clarify with you.

Christianity's a little different... I think "honor" actually has enough of an agreed-upon definition that you wouldn't need to get tangled up in the definition of "honor." That's actually another instructive example: Two people arguing about whether a third person "has honor" are unlikely to be unintentionally wrangling about "what does honor mean," and so getting themselves confused about it in the same way that they might be if they're arguing about "Zionism" or "socialism," and so it's more likely to be productive. They might disagree, but they won't extensively go in circles about it. With these kind of broad and definition-varies-by-the-person definitions, you just have to be really careful with how you apply it and talk about it, especially when huge issues of good and evil are involved, or else you're going to do material harm to people who are trying to help you, and make it more difficult for them to help you.

So… you’re on board with defining some people as “evil,”

Where the actual fuck did I do that?

When you posted the article about "the ‘evils’ of Zionism" along with "Zionism has proven how evil our society can be" and "a supremacist ideology created to destroy and conquer everything and everyone in its way. This is Zionism."

Again, he's not wrong. I get what he's saying, it is accurate. But you can understand how someone who thinks "Zionist = anyone who thinks Israel should be allowed to exist" could read that and then object to it. Right? Or no? I feel like you're having a lot of trouble grasping simple points here.

I’ve actually seen people get accused of being Zionists

I already told you: "I personally don’t consider the word “zionist” to be a slur." I don't use it as an accusation. So I don't know what to do with your defensiveness here.

Advanced reading comprehension: Why did I bring this up? I get that you don't know what to do with it, but what point was I trying to make when bringing up accusations of someone being a Zionist that I've seen before? I've touched on it and why it is important a few different times.

Yeah. It's also notable that Rasoul is a Democratic committee chair, and he's been railing against Israel's "war" for years now, and all of that has always been fine. It became an issue with this particular post, for the reasons you specified, and now people are trying to use it as a way to spin up this whole thing where the Democrats hate the Palestinians and want to silence his criticism of Israel, and this is just more proof.