So I think the irony is that if standing with Israel means he can win the election, it’s still a better outcome for Palestine than if he loses. If he loses the election, Trump will tell Israel to just go ahead and glass the area.

The irony is how much you have twisted your political beliefs to find a position you feel ok about this from.

The majority of Americans think what Israel is doing is heinous and want it to stop, the idea that Americans are evenly divided on this is not grounded in reality.

I especially can’t stand that people keep treating it as a fact here that US voters are split 50-50 on Israel’s genocide to stop. The polling is clear, US voters with a decisive majority support Palestine and ending this genocide.

People in this thread asserting that most Americans support Israeli’s actions in this genocide rather than support Palestinians as a some kind of indisputable fact as part of their rhetorical arguments is a self fulfilling prophecy of attempting to manufacture consensus where it doesn’t exist.

I can certainly appreciate the point, but realistically what can he actually do? Israel have already shown that they don’t actually give a toss about what the US of A thinks.

Israel is literally existentially dependent on the US along multiple vectors including material military aid and diplomatic cover (especially now that they have made themselves a pariah state globally), this means that Biden has holds ALL of the leverage. Biden just has to actually demonstrate to Netanyahu he isn’t playing around, which Biden has being doing the opposite of.

Terrorism is not an ideological choice, it is a military strategy employed by groups that do not have the means to fight a more traditional conflict.

Hamas uses “terrorism” but the IDF doesn’t need “terrorism” because it has tanks, advanced fighter jets and one of the most advanced and well armed militaries in the world. It can just slaughter innocent tens of thousands of Palestinians and claim it is doing “military operations” and the world media will shake their heads and agree.

I appreciate that for you this may be a chance you are willing to take. I have trouble understanding why anyone would feel that way given the systemic issues of undermining US support for Israel that mean we cannot “stop the genocide” anyway. But thank you for having this dialog.

I understand you feeling that way. I feeling strongly about my position and I will not budge from it because it is founded in my beliefs, I can’t just see this as a tactical decision divorced from the aspect of me as a citizen directly endorsing probably one of the worst genocides in my lifetime (happening with my countries bombs, my countries military training, likely with military advisors from my countries military heavily assisting every level of this genocide).

This is a prototype for a darker future of mass scale violence against groups of people, for example how many US police departments have trained directly with the IDF, the entity that is slaughtering innocent civilians left and right in Gaza? The answer is a lotttt of them. This is a prototype and this is a test and if we do not reject this genocide with an existential disgust and fervor and a willingness to walk away from this voting coalition that benefits us in the near term, the prototype will have been demonstrated to be successful to the ruling class and that future should scare the shit out of you.

Shame on us for being afraid to defend our value because corporate democrats have set up an impossible choice and then argued for progressives to choose them by attacking them rhetorically.

I appreciate that for you this may be a chance you are willing to take

I don’t see this as be willing or not willing to take a chance, I see this as there being no choice in the first place. This is a moment where it’s “ride or die”. Biden can put his chips on the table and prove he treats progressive voters as genuinely part of his core voting bloc. Or he can keep assuming that young progressives will fall in line no matter what and in my opinion that is equally as catastrophic of an outcome if we just fall in line and agree to sweep Biden’s despicable enabling of the mass scale slaughter of 70,000? Palestinian men, women and children (we don’t even know the real numbers because Israel has killed all the journalists it can get its hand on in Gaza).

Now is the time to wield our power, now is the time to shut this shit down. There is no next time, no “we just have to vote for Biden here and then we can do the good work later”. If Biden refuses to budge on this, we have already lost and centrist democrats leveling the blame for that at people like me is lazy and frankly absurd.

I want to vote for Biden and I will, as soon as he calls up Netanyahu and tells him this genocide is over, period. I am not being a troll, if Biden takes serious action and stops this genocide then he immediately gets my vote. Very simple calculation for Biden here.

We can limit the harm by putting pressure on an administration - and, crucially it is working to some degree.

Cool so what me and other people who have had enough genocide and think similarly are going to do is loudly tell Biden (which we are doing) that we want to vote for him, but we can’t unless he stops the genocide of Palestinians. Words are meaningless, small concessions are meaningless, he needs to stop the genocide NOW.

It appears at this point, this is the only way leverage will work because centrists democrats have proven thoroughly how cynically they see progressives and the ideologies they base their politics on. Crucially, I didn’t create these conditions where this is the only place progressives feel they have power in this coalition, centrist democrats like Biden did. I don’t accept the blame for that, I have always made it very clear I hope that genocide is a red line for me as a voter, full stop.

Netanyahu just told Biden to take a hike. Thus, “full stop” disproving what you have said.

Netanyahu will say whatever he wants on tv, the Israeli military industrial complex is utterly dependent upon the US military industrial complex. Netanyahu has no play here and everybody knows it except apparently Biden (or maybe he just doesn’t care I don’t know, it honestly doesn’t matter at the end of the day, action matters).

No matter that Biden is himself simply does not have the power to unilaterally stop Israel’s actions?

He literally does, Israel cannot function as a state without an immense amount of US diplomatic cover, weapons, and fucktons of money.

Biden can stop it right this genocide in a matter of minutes by calling up Netanyahu and telling him it is over, full stop. I am sorry but I will not vote for a candidate that behaves this way.

Far far worse is the simple fact that our chances of stopping Israel’s genocide go to zero under Trump. You think a Republican administration will stop it if you protest? At least with Biden you know it works and you know you can make a dent.

Why are you lecturing me about this? Stop wasting your breath on me.

It is very simple, if Biden wants my vote and votes from people like me, he can stop the genocide in Palestine.

Period.

Has the genocide of Palestinians stopped?

I will vote for Biden when he genuinely stops the genocide, until that point I really don’t care what silly political posturing and shuffling around of bombs in warehouses and on logistics sheets Biden does. Even if we stop providing weapons right now of any kind, the entire apparatus of the IDF and indeed Israel itself is dependent on the US military industrial complex, the fact that Biden has not used that leverage to stop this genocide of Palestinians means he is complicit.

Genocide is my red line, and if Biden is going to be windy washy about coming back over that red line don’t blame people like me for not being satisfied.

Has the genocide actually stopped or did Genocide Joe just move the goalposts?

Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as *outsourcing

*Class Warfare

FTFY

no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities

Ahahahaha right, I love how you just accept the legally defined rights of what a union can do and what it can’t as if those laws in any given country aren’t just a record of the battlefield between the working class and the ruling class. A union can do whatever the fuck a union wants to do, and the law will attempt to constrain it in favor of the ruling class and capitalists to the degree that is politically tenable in a given environment. Sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it will fail, but unions fundamentally exist outside of capitalism because they have a level of legitimacy that capitalism and the idea of owning other people’s labor will never have.

It hardly needs to be said that like libraries, if unions didn’t already exist as a concept there is no way they would be legal at all if they were developed in this day and age. Unions are only ever temporarily legal along limited contexts under capitalism.

Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.

high five solidarity my friend, even when you insult my intelligence you are still far more my friend than my boss will ever be

First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.

"There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec- tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,” the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall unionization.

There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits, such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide “due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage- setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g., training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave)."

https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/

https://files.epi.org/page/-/old/briefingpapers/143/bp143.pdf

i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.

You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.

And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now.

Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.

Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.

It won’t.

Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.

Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).

^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money

I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.

Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.

It’s super effective, the commenter is an ADHD type Pokémon!

The commenter will not get anything productive done for the rest of the day and will instead go on a tangent researching meerkats.

I can’t help but think that the people who came up with the idea that charging for transit is good because it keeps homeless off the trains aren’t actually interested in improving either transit or homelessness.

Congratulations your Mk II I-Don’t-Think-You-Assholes-Actually-Care Fire and Forget Torpedo scored a direct hit on your opponents Battleship HMS Austerity hitting the engine room and immediately (rhetorically) obliterating five whole subreddits of libertarians.

Thank you for your service