PhilipTheBucket

If someone didn’t say thing A, but you’re pretending they did so you can make a big fuss about how they’re wrong about thing A when they actually said thing B, please don’t do that.

In fact, in general, it’s not good to try to “win” the conversation. If you said your thing, and they said their thing, and you all had your chance to understand it and make any counter arguments and ask questions, then the mission is accomplished. Not everyone has to see things the same way, just understand each other.

I think we're both repeating ourselves at this point.

If you want to say anything about what I said about how it translated into social media, which was to me the main point of both OP's question and what I was saying, I'm open to it.

Yet again, you’re conflating “support a ceasefire” with “support letting Israel get destroyed if Netanyahu gives the middle finger to the idea of a ceasefire.” Everyone “supports” a ceasefire, in the abstract.

You’re also vastly overestimating how much most Americans care about the Palestinians, sadly. I’m not trying to defend Biden’s atrocious way he handled this. I’m saying that if he’d done perfectly and threatened Netanyahu like you said, played hardball, then the exact same social media campaign that played the young left like a piano about it for the last 8 months wouldn’t have had a word to say about it, and would have been banging the drum about record oil extraction and how much he betrayed us on the climate, and would have been playing up how badly be betrayed Israel the to centrists, and the person who is not him and didn’t make the decisions would have lost even more badly than she did.

I’m not saying Biden did good, and I’m definitely not saying anyone who thinks Israel’s committing a monstrous horror is wrong. I am saying that America’s enemies foreign and domestic have gotten real good at playing up real issues into their desired electoral outcomes, and their desired electoral outcomes are 10 times more horror. Maybe more.

So now we’ve gone from one phone call, to cutting off aid and letting Israel get destroyed. The US can do that, sure. No problem. If Biden did that, no Democrats would win elections for the next 20 years. He’d probably get impeached, with the full support of all those AIPAC Democrats in congress, and then they’d get their aid from his replacement.

I think he had the phone call, said Rafah was a red line, Netanyahu went in anyway, and that’s the choice he faced. Like I say, you’re claiming that he just randomly decided not to do anything when it would have been incredibly easy, for reason that don’t make the slightest bit of sense for Biden even in terms of his own self-interest.

Besides that, Kamala is at least an unknown quantity in it. There’s a middleeasteye article comparing the two somewhere in my history. We don’t know she won’t continue Biden’s policies, but she also wasn’t the one in charge at the time, and we don’t know that she will continue them. With Trump, we know we’re getting a monster.

You fired the babysitter because when her brother was in charge, your kid got bit by a dog. Now, you’re saying it’s no different if a known vicious dog is the babysitter, because what’s the difference. To me that makes no sense.

Blame can be shared.

If one person left a bunch of oily rags in my home, and then when they caught fire, someone else refused to fight the fire but in fact let it actively continue, then I can blame both people.

I hear you. There are certain types of argumentation that I see on Lemmy over and over again, and almost always leading towards a conclusion about not voting for Democrats, to the point that I react with a decent amount of hostility to them.

The fact of the matter is that Biden has emboldened Israel enough where they are actively performing an extermination campaign in Gaza, invading Lebanon and the West Bank, and escalating to a regional war with Iran.

True.

All of this could have been stopped with a single phone call from Biden at any point in the past 13 months.

False. He had many phone calls. They didn’t help.

An active genocide in Gaza and the possibility of an escalating regional war was one of the most massive threats to Biden’s reelection prospects. Look what happened.

If he could have ended it with one phone call, just cancelled the whole operation, he would have. Are you trying to tell me that he just loves dead Palestinians and war in the Middle East so much that he wanted the whole thing to happen even though it was absolute kryptonite to his own and his party’s domestic political prospects, in addition to being a historic crime against humanity, just because?

This is why a genocide under the Trump administration is seems as more or less the same thing.

Absolutely false. Wait and see, and observe the difference. Not that it wasn’t already a stain on humanity, but it’s now going to get substantially worse.

My guess is that by the end of Trump’s term, all of Gaza will be annexed to Israel, and all the Palestinians that were there will be exiled or dead. None of this 35,000 numbers anymore, with aid coming in sometimes. And, several other Gaza-like situations will have come up all over the world, with Trump actively pushing them forward instead of just handing over weapons to the one who wants to be doing them.

Because it’s happening as we speak, and Biden is doing nothing to stop or slow them down.

~~False. See above.~~

Edit: You know what? This one is true, I guess. He’s “trying” but not enough to accomplish much of anything. My mental model is that he’s stuck between losing support if he sends weapons, and losing support from the majority of Americans that are pro-Israel, if he doesn’t. But yes, the level of resistance he’s offering isn’t stopping it.

The difference is, Trump will hit the gas, and support Netanyahu no matter how many Arabs he kills, I think. Also he’ll start mistreating Arabs inside the US, and destroy Palestinian aid agencies, as he did during his first term. He really doesn’t like Arabs.

It’s not that Arabs voted overwhelmingly in favor of Trump, they just refused to vote for Democrats on principle.

True.

Turns out arming a nation that is actively engaged with the genocide of Arabs, silencing them when speaking up, and staunchly defending said country is something that turned Arabs off from voting for the Democrats again.

Absolutely true.

I’m not trying to have any kind of hostile interaction with you. I feel bad about doing so and I hear @dragontamer@lemmy.world about just wanting to learn about the situation without needing people to fight in the comments. Just saying how I see it point by point through your narrative. The whole element of it that is presupposing that Biden wanted all of this to happen, or that Trump won’t cause an absolutely insane acceleration of the slaughter operation, is what’s making me mad about it.

That's fair, but you weren't answering OP's question.

You acted as if OP had asked if Israel was committing a monstrous crime, or whether Biden and Harris were linked to that. They absolutely are, and you can draw a very direct line from Biden to that, although a lot less so from Harris.

OP's question was how the absolutely insane idea that a good thing to do for the Arabs would be to let Trump get elected came from. You seem like you're echoing that idea, right at the very end, and I invite you to watch things get infinitely worse for all Israel's victims, starting immediately, if you still think that.

You didn't explain anything about how that point of view, which has now come to its ugly conclusion and will result in a quick acceleration of the genocide already in progress, might have spread so widely on social media, when if looked at from first principles it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Mostly you spent a long time saying Israel is killing on an industrial scale and it's wrong. We all think that, I think. You don't need to tell us.

Actually, even that wasn't what OP asked. They asked where each commenter first saw this type of thing on social media, to get some data about how it might have gotten into the public consciousness. But that second-to-last question is a lot more similar to what OP asked than what you said.

As long as a majority of Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, Sanders’ economic policies have less mass appeal and offer more opportunities for attack ads than you think. It needs to be stressed that people voted for Trump not just because he’s a loud-mouthed racist and sexist and they like that, but also because he inherited the (irrational) image of Republicans being better for the economy.

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/trackers/fame-and-popularity-bernie-sanders

He's more popular than either Trump or Kamala Harris was, and people seemed to think both of them had enough mass appeal.

The image of Trump exists more or less in a media vacuum, because they can't say much of anything about either Trump or Kamala. Bernie speaks directly about the economy, in terms that people can understand, and every time he says things, he draws wild amounts of appeal from the both the downtrodden right-voting people and the downtrodden left-voting people, who are otherwise left with nothing but responding to the vague promptings of the media within the vacuum.

Even Trump has to imitate Bernie's type of speaking, talking about draining the swamp and fighting for the little man, but he can't do it very well. The media has to fill in the blanks for him. Bernie can do it directly, and from what I've seen, it works very well. Do you remember when he went on Joe Rogan and what people's reaction was to that?

Public opinion on Israel was, even among college kids, very different in 2016, before the current wave of massed anti-Israel propaganda from Russian, Chinese and Iranian bot farms sweeping over social media - and even now most voters (as in: people who actually vote) are still more pro-Israel than pro-Palestine (which makes sense, given how important of a partner Israel is to the US) - and it’s still not high on the list of priorities for most, not even remotely high enough to be mentioned side-by-side with economic policy, which is and almost always has been the number one priority.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/611375/americans-views-israel-palestinian-authority-down.aspx

You might be right. I think a huge factor is that on left-wing social media, which is what you and I use, the Gaza issue was hugely amplified and linked to Biden/Harris, in a way that other issues that were much more favorable were not. For the normie social media, I think they did the same thing with the economy, which also worked gangbusters.

Are you saying that the polls are completely wrong? What are you basing the idea on that the “majority of the people” (reminder: the majority of voters just elected Trump - he actually got the popular vote this time, which is deeply, deeply troubling) have left-leaning positions on the economy and Israel?

I am saying the polls are, in general, completely wrong, yes. I think the most recent election which was anything but the toss-up they predicted is a good example of that.

Bernie's economics are "left," but within the spectrum of the average American voter, they aren't seen as left-only. He doesn't care much about Democrat branding issues. He cares about people's pain and how to stick it to the crooks, and he speaks well about it. That's why the Democrats didn't like him.

One other prolific poster said he was American and was aggressive to the point of psychosis about Kamala and Trump being the same on Gaza, then used non-American numbering style, dots instead of commas I think, like $5.000.000 for 5 million, and then pretended not to understand the question when people asked him about it.

The other day there were a couple of people in my comments insisting that anarchists shouldn’t vote in this election, but with weird inconsistencies in whether they were claiming to be American or British. And someone told me that a bunch of users I was arguing with about this topic all suddenly got deleted right after the election.

There were a few more times when their masks slipped off, that’s just what comes to mind right now.

Found one.

I think a lot of it hinges on what a “moderate” is, in the American political frame of reference, and whether one of those is good enough for most of the American people who don’t live in Washington or NYC to ever have a chance of living a decent life.

You’ve got a point, I guess, about some of it. But I still mostly stick by my statement that Hillary fucked it, when Bernie would have crushed it, on economic policy and sanity in our Israel policy among several other key issues where the majority of people feel very differently than the people in DC and on the news do.