mozz

So, not enough on its own, but voting (ground troops) working in the same direction in boring and steady fashion to accomplish the goal, enabled to overcome otherwise impossible blockages by massively influential but too-inconsistent-to-be-relied-upon-for-minute-to-minute-progress direct action (air support).

I 100% approve this message

(Actually, I would go a step further and say that unions make better units of coalition than do political parties made up of a professional politician class - that combines the best of both worlds, providing consistent progress within a democratic framework without nearly as much of a “neither of these assholes represent me” failure mode)

I mean the evidence exists that NATO is a substantially higher power here

Also, as I said, there’s a huge difference between “I know it’s not an ideal outcome but I’m scared and want to save my skin” - I won’t say someone’s always wrong for saying that, by any means - and saying to someone else who’s fighting and suffering to defend themselves “I know it’s not an ideal outcome but you should be scared, and accept it to save your skin.” It’s like cowardice by proxy. Especially while they’re winning.

I literally tittered like a schoolgirl observing how many yelling-guys from the meme are in this thread with their short top level comments. Taken in aggregate it is funny to me like “oh shit this meme hit a nerve it looks like”

Nobody said don’t be upset with the genocide. They said let’s elect the guy who’s doing a poor job trying to stop one genocide, and not let the guy win who wants 10 genocides.

This is the actual deal. It's been approved by the US, UN, and Qatar as a mediator. According to the US, it came from Israel, but there's apparently a little civil war going on in Israel's government about whether to "agree" to it or not. It seems likely to me that the terms were simply dictated to a mostly-unwilling Israeli government, then announced (by the US) "on behalf of Israel," and now they're pouting about it but also don't want to say out loud to their sugar daddy "fuck you I don't want to," because then we might stop arming them so comprehensively and vetoing things for them at the UN, and so they're stuck.

Hamas's proposed changes are not public, so it's impossible to say how big a deal they are or how necessary. I tend to blame Israel in general because they are so clearly acting in bad faith and also they're the ones killing all these innocent people, but... I also have to say that Blinken's statement makes some sense to me.

It would have been very easy for Hamas to simply agree to the deal on the table, and if Israel wants to reject it, or “accept” it but just continue the war immediately under some paper thin excuse (both of which seem highly likely), then at least there's not this weird confusion about whose fault that is. It's hard to come up with an explanation for Hamas wanting changes and fucking the whole thing up that doesn't involve blaming them for the inevitable results of that decision at least partly. To me as an unqualified observer person.

All sounds 100% accurate. (Or, well, it was until they proceeded further than that into outright wholesale slaughter 6-7 months ago.) Did I give the impression that I thought that it was not?

Disclaimer: I have no idea and it's confusing; I just read a bunch of stories just now; and people lie sometimes. That said, these are the details of the full plan as of a couple weeks ago, which supposedly came from Israel but which they immediately clammed up about whether or not they actually would agree to, not saying either yes or no for quite some time, which was weird. There is still some uncertainty over whether they will "agree to" their own proposal.

This is the best story I could find which actually somewhat explains what's going on at this point. According to it:

• Hamas didn't reject the deal but they asked for changes (details not made public and people disagree about what they were and how big they are). Personally I tend to put quite a lot of faith in the Qatari spokesman whose blackly comic summary of the issue was "two fundamental differences; between what Hamas wants as a permanent ceasefire, and what Israel wants as a hostage release and maybe a plan to continue the war."
• On that note, someone in Israel's government (no one knows who) said yesterday, "Israel will not end the war before achieving all its war objectives: destroying Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, freeing all the hostages and ensuring Gaza doesn’t pose a threat to Israel in the future." I.e. we get all the hostages back and keep killing you until we feel like we're done, and then at that point, we'll be happy to cease fire.
• We finally see the details of what's going on in Israel's government: Sounds like Benny Gantz (who already resigned) and Yair Lapid are supporting the cease-fire, and Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir have threatened to "collapse the government" if it goes through. Nothing public about what Netanyahu thinks but Benny Gantz cited disagreements with him as why he was resigning.
• Both Blinken and Qatar are blaming both Israel and Hamas for doing too much bickering and not enough agreeing to the cease fire. Blinken points out, with maybe a certain amount of validity, that Hamas could have simply said "yes" to the US/Israel/UN/Qatari approved plan already on the table instead of giving the Israelis any room to blame them and keep the war going which is clearly what they wanted to do anyway.

TL;DR it's probably Israel's fault

Yeah. I feel like partly too it's like those hypnosis experiments where people will invent literally just any nonsense to explain why they did / said something, and it makes perfect sense to them -- it's like now that I have staked out position X, I'm going to just wrap whatever nonsense around it that I need to, to make it all consistent after the fact.

Like, as related to that whole analogy I asked the guy about in the thread I linked to — yeah sure, if someone came to your house and did that, you'd totally do whatever they asked and it would be wrong of you to try to resist. Absolutely dude. 100%. Makes perfect sense and I feel silly for questioning it now.

This conversation and this whole thing of why it was the West's fault because Ukraine should have done exactly what Russia demanded and saved themselves all the bloodshed, absolutely infuriated me. Above all proportion for what's reasonable to happen from talking to someone on the internet. I'm still getting pissed about it just reading it now, a week later.

Yep. All 100% accurate. In particular, the part about people who were trying to do socialism without good protection from a geopolitical superpower and getting some good results from it and then all getting assassinated by the US and forcibly replaced by a CIA backed mini-Hitler. All that shit happens and is probably still happening today.

I said I wouldn't argue it out, but I don't actually disagree with anything you said up there, and so I do want to say my take on it and explain a little more what I meant in context:

I think you're 100% right on the evil nature of the big capitalistic countries. I think that a lot of that, though, is actually not to do with capitalism but is simply the nature of humans and power -- big, powerful countries tend to be controlled by powerful men who want to accrete and use power in ways that are actively oppressive to all kinds of people at home and abroad, basically all the way up to the limit of what is the absolute rapacious maximum they can get away with.

It's not to say capitalism's not dangerous -- it's incredibly dangerous, both because of some unique dangerous features, and because it's one effective engine for accreting power which then of course winds up in the hands of the wrong people. But, in my opinion (which you might not agree with), the history is that the non capitalistic countries that have risen to great power actually display more or less the exact same behavior -- actually worse, for as bad of a standard as the big capitalistic powers set -- within the limits of their power at the time. And the reason the US and Europe are such effective engines of oppression in the global south right now is not solely because they're capitalist, but largely just because they're the ones in a geopolitical position to be able to do it and get away with it.

This is not to say that it's not a problem. It's a huge problem and talking about a solution to it sounds like a great thing to do. But I think the modern history of the USSR and China is a caution against thinking "if we can just get rid of the capitalism then that'll get rid of the colonialism and domestic oppression, obviously." I honestly don't really know what the actual answer is, but it looks to me from just looking over the history of the 20th century from a non expert perspective that "more democracy" (like, actual democratic institutions, not US imperialism dressed up in a coat that says "democracy") is a more reliable solution to imperialism than is "less capitalism."

That's my take on it. In general I think left and socialist solutions are the right way; that's why I was talking about the KPD being on "the right side of history" because I agree with you about them -- especially the ones of them who would have been politically active in the 1920s -- not being the type to start world wars, but just going after justice for people economic and otherwise. But I also think that there's a danger there of thinking that every left solution is going to be a good solution to every geopolitical problem without looking over the history and seeing how things play out in practice.

I don't really want to go in circles about this. The one additional thing I'll say:

I could just as easily say that the SDP could've thrown their weight behind Thälmann and that might have stopped Hitler, and maybe it would have, or maybe it wouldn't.

I think this is very true, yes. (Both the futility of speculating on what might have been, and the shared responsibility on the SPD side.) There's some level of shared blame involved between the SPD for not unifying with the KPD, and the KPD for not unifying with the SPD. What the allocation is, I honestly don't know enough to say.

On the other hand, I also do think it's relevant that the countries run by the same people (ideologically) who were backing Thälmann turned into totalitarian nightmares, where people were risking death to flee from in order to get to places run by people like Hindenburg, in the decades after the war, when all the Hitler issues were in the past. If we're going to analyze the viewpoint that the KPD was on the right side of history and the SPD should have dropped everything and unified with them, then I think that's a relevant data point.

I suspect that you don't see it that way precisely (in terms of the pleasantness level of postwar East Germany or USSR as places to live in compared with prewar Germany), and I probably won't want to argue it out if you don't agree with me on it -- just saying my take on it according to my view of things.

When a government gets millions of people killed for no reason, using violence against that government is completely justified.

Got it, I understand what you're saying. Sure. Like I say, you're not really wrong in this.

However, you could say, getting so bent out of shape when they use violence against you back against your rebellion that you're still holding a grudge about it more than a decade later, even to the point of refusing to work with them against someone who's going to get 75 million people (and nearly 100% of your particular political party) killed, seems shortsighted. That's more my point than anything about "justified" or the right side of history.

But is it really that bad to vote some small 3rd Party?

Not at all, 0%. But there's an order of operations. Work for ranked choice voting, work for outcomes on a smaller scale where a third party can gain functioning influence, work to pressure the Democrats to back away from some of their more fascist-y policies (which sometimes involves wielding threats of voting in particular ways that they might not like), work for better outcomes in ways which don't involve politicians at all.

All of those sound great to me. Working for a system in which things can exist that aren't our current displeasing duopoly actually sounds like a critical part of making the whole system work again. But choosing to have 0 influence on an important (crucial) outcome, risking a total catastrophe, because you wish something better existed, seems pretty foolish in comparison to actually working to make that better thing exist for real (while avoiding catastrophe in the meantime).