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Digamma-F-Wau posted:well it's not like Palestinians wouldn't be genocided if the republicans were in power. It's not "things are better for us and worse for Palestine vs things are worse for us and better for Palestine"; it's "things are better for us but Palestine is getting shat on vs things are worse for us and Palestine is getting just as shat on"; our comparative lack of suffering isn't being tied to Palestinian suffering. "Vote for the lesser of two evil genocide-ers" really isn't a great rallying cry. I can't judge someone for thinking differently about this, but I personally draw a line in the sand at the explicit and open support of genocide. At a certain level of evil (and to me, Biden's actions meet that standard), I just can't do the electoral calculus in the face of something so horrendous. The thought of voting for Biden after this makes me viscerally, physically ill - like I really think I can't pull the lever for him even if I know that on the balance it's the better "rational choice". But I'm married to a Muslim so the whole "dehumanization and devaluing of Muslim lives" thing hits harder when it's your wife and her family. (Biden better be able to win with 0% of the Muslim vote, because that's what he's likely to get)
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Oct 27, 2023 22:30
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Biden administration uses emergency authority to sell tank shells to Israel quote:The Biden administration has used an emergency authority to allow the sale of about 14,000 tank shells to Israel without congressional review, the Pentagon said on Saturday. Assume I'm someone who believes that: 1) Genocide is the most severe and horrific crime that can be committed. 2) It is always morally unacceptable to vote for someone who supports, enables, and facilitates genocide. 3) Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The overwhelming consensus in this thread every time this has come up is that anyone who refuses to vote for Biden (e.g. because he's blatantly supporting genocide) is being petty or immature or childish. I do actually believe in those three premises (which obviously entail that it's morally unacceptable to vote for Biden). Since most people here disagree, I'd like to know where you think someone like me is going wrong with this reasoning. I don't think many people would dispute 1). It's possible to dispute 3), but in light of the very strong statements from just about every human rights organization in the past few weeks, I doubt many people here would seriously dispute it at least. That leaves 2). I get the sense that many (if not most) posters here believe that, actually, it is morally acceptable to vote for someone who supports, enables, and facilitates genocide. Presumably, those who hold that view have a strong justification for it. I'd really like to hear that justification spelled out explicitly.
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Dec 9, 2023 22:00
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Koos Group posted:Hello all. The "electoralism" discussion a few days ago was, with all due respect, an embarrassment. As such, I'm going to be instituting martial law around that subject. You can still discuss it if it comes up again, but any rule violations while doing so will have a 1-day minimum probation - and presenting talking points everyone has heard before that are not falsifiable or a direct response to another argument is, as a reminder, against the rules. Could you kindly clarify what your working definition of 'electoralism' is? I'm somewhat familiar with the term as its used in a polisci context, but as far as I can tell many people in this thread use it to refer to... anything related to elections or voting. I presume that in the primary US politics thread, we are still allowed to debate our reasons to vote for or against a specific candidate, right? Also, are we permitted to have discussions about values, which (unless someone has made a truly astounding discovery since I was in grad school), are not falsifiable? I'm using "values" in the "fact/value distinction" sense here, i.e. normative judgments which are (basically) by definition not subject to falsification by means of empirical data but which (imo at least, though I don't think anyone seriously disputes this) are necessary for normative reasoning. (I don't post a lot here & don't keep up with threads religiously, I apologize if the answers to my questions are obvious from what you wrote or the general context of discussion. Someone made an interesting post on deontology/consequentialism a few days ago and I wanted to respond when I had time, that's why I'm asking really.)
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Dec 12, 2023 23:32
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Yeah, but Israel isn't driving the overall approval numbers. Those have been in the high-30's and low 40's for over a year. I suspect (though this would be hard to prove) that the Israeli conflict/massacre is hardening some tentative "no to Biden votes". That is: While it's correct in general that you can't trust a poll this far out from the election, and you'd expect a large number of people who ultimately will vote for Biden to say that they will not (i.e. to voice displeasure at some policies they don't like or w/e), if the set of people most-inclined to voice dissatisfaction in that matter harden their position such that they won't end up voting for Biden, it wouldn't show in an obvious way in the polls. Since young people are (as far as I know) both the most likely to be otherwise displeased with Biden and the group most adamantly opposed to his his handling of the Israel situation, I believe this is at least plausible. Obviously how much this matters for the election depends on how long the conflict drags out. If Palestinian deaths continue at the current rate (or increase exponentially accelerate due to starvation/disease), and if that continues for months and months, Biden is probably doomed unless he really can find enough moderates to replace <35 Democrats. Similarly, if Biden does take a more forceful stance against indiscriminate Israeli mass-murder, and Netanyahu just ignores him, he'll look incredibly weak and probably lose moderates. If this escalates into a regional war with Iran/Yemen, or if the Israelis drag us into a conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and US troops get deployed, I suspect Biden will find it almost impossible to recover support. There seems to be a lot of optimism in this thread that the I/P situation will end quickly and that everyone will forget about it by the election. Maybe that is true, but that's not the trajectory that events are on right now, and the only major actor an immediate end to the conflict directly benefits is Biden. A long war keeps Netanyahu out of prison, increases global sympathy for the Palestinian liberation movement, and increases support for the Iranian-lead "axis of resistance" throughout the Arab world. (Obviously it would be good for Palestinian civilians for the war to end soon but they don't really have a say in any material sense). If Biden wants this to end soon enough that it's forgotten by election time, he's going to have to do a lot more than he has been doing in order to bring that state of affairs about. Given how he's been acting thus far, I don't see much reason to believe that he's capable of doing that (since it would inevitably require exerting real leverage over the Israelis), and am perplexed by the aforementioned optimism here.
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Dec 18, 2023 23:19
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The Top G posted:You are projecting your own beliefs and practices unto others. No, not everyone plagiarizes. It is very simple to appropriately cite one’s sources and thereby avoid plagiarism. Millions of students manage to do it every year! As a recovering academic I disagree with this. Or at least I disagree with the notion that it's simple. I probably read ~6000 pages of source material - all of which was focused on the same tiny topic - when working on my dissertation. I'm certain that somewhere in there I used a sentence structurally similar to something the source material. I'm honestly not sure how I could possibly avoid doing that. If you read the same or similar things over and over again for months, you're going to absorb some of the common phrases and sentence structures into your writing, and if someone looks long and hard enough (especially with an agenda), they'll certainly find something they could plausibly pass off as plagiarism. I agree that it's simple to avoid blatant and egregious plagiarism. If it's so simple to cross check every sentence of a 200-page dissertation against every possible source you've read (some of which are are arcane or pre-print works that aren't digitized into any plagiarism detection database), I'd love to hear it.
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Jan 4, 2024 16:36
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Kalit posted:For all of you who think Biden will lose more votes, and possibly the election, because of his current stance with Israel/Palestine: do you honestly think he would have more votes if he was constantly being painted as anti-Semitic by AIPAC? Especially if AIPAC pulled their money from Biden and shoveled it to Trump (or whoever the R nominee is)? I'm not so sure that a large chunk of our population really is actively pro-Zionist. The pro-Israel position has been the default for both parties for twice as long as most of us have been alive. I suspect it's just a thoughtless default position for a lot of people who don't pay that much attention. Given the tribal nature of our politics and society, if Biden changed his position I imagine 99% of democrats would instantly support him & 99% of republicans would be even more vocally pro-genocide, or something. Tbh, we've never seen a president do anything but tow the AIPAC line. Are they really that much of a *political* powerhouse? Can they really motivate a bunch of voters? Everything I know about them indicates that the main source of their influence is the relations they've built with other politicians. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems likely that politicians listen to AIPAC because they want the money (and are worried about it going to their opponent). Which probably matters in a house or senate race, but the total amount of money AIPAC can mobilize is probably a rounding error in the presidential contest. It would also be super risky for AIPAC to declare war on a major party's candidate. How do you think most democrats would react if AIPAC helped push Trump over the line? It'd make support for Israel a 100% partisan issue, which is probably more dangerous to Israel over the long term than Biden giving them slightly fewer weapons or whatever.
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Jan 5, 2024 12:47
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Read the essay, it's more than a title. The argument is not that fascists don't have brains, it is that they do not use them (or if they do use them, it is not on the subjects of their fascism). That's a ridiculously silly position. Just looking at some of the names already mentioned, both Heidegger* and Schmitt gave elaborate intellectual defenses of fascism. Schmitt specifically has a very large body of political philosophy and legal theory that not only justifies fascism, but essentially argues that it is inevitable. I think Schmitt in particular is deeply evil, but I do not believe that anyone could read his work and think that he's stupid. Basically every leftist academic I know thinks his arguments deserve to be taken seriously even though they find him personally repugnant and strongly disagree with his conclusions. Honestly, y'all should read (though not pay for, if you can avoid it) The Concept of the Political. It's the best presentation of the internal logic of authoritarianism/fascism that I've ever seen, and illustrates very well the way in which authoritarians have a totally different conception of what politics is than you or I (or any liberal or leftist) does. *In fairness to Heidegger I think he was more of a careerist coward who would have justified anything if it'd benefit him, but Schmitt was 100% a true believer.
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Jan 10, 2024 20:36
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plogo posted:In unfairness to Heidegger (because I have not engaged with his work in any meaningful sense) I would also note that the blogger's argument is partially cribbing Hannah Arendt who had personal reasons to want to absolve Heidegger. Just to be clear, the reason why I think Heidegger is a coward is that, as someone who has engaged with his work in a meaningful sense (albeit not by choice), the places where he appears to defend fascism are especially unclear (even for Heidegger, which is saying a lot). IMO he was hedging his bets - writing an obscure/ambiguous defense of fascism that was just ambiguous enough that he could try to claim it wasn't really a defense of fascism at all. But anyway, as to the original point, turns out I do still have a copy of Schmitt's book from a grad seminar I took a decade ago:   I guess people can judge for themselves whether they think that's stupid thought I hope we can all agree that it's evil. (As a fun exercise, compare Schmitt's presentation of fascist political theory with the way that a certain apartheid state regards its victims...) PeterWeller posted:If Heidegger wasn't a true believer, then he was at least a fellow traveler. His concepts of agrarianism and a return to simpler lives in simpler times grow from the same root of nostalgic mythology as every other regressive philosophy that plagued the 20th century. Fair enough, though (IMO, people disagree, etc) the presentation of existential phenomenology in Being and Time is extremely derivative of Husserl's later work and it's possible to draw a distinction between Heidegger's development of Husserl's later thought and the weird primitivism that he thinks it entails. It's been a decade so don't ask me to explain this in detail, but I think the "return to a simple peasant lifestyle" stuff was most prominent in his later work and personally I always thought it was inconsistent w/ the earlier stuff. Don't take this as a defense of Heidegger or anything, I've just always thought the peasant poo poo was strange and out of place (but that might be because I'm reading Heidegger's phenomenology as largely continuous w/ Husserl). I'll stop with the derail, this isn't a 20th century European philosophy thread & I was always more into 19th century stuff anyway.
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Jan 10, 2024 21:47
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Raenir Salazar posted:So you were incorrect to refer to it as "Israel is not hiding that they're capitalizing on this opportunity to commit genocide and to expand their controlled territory, including the settlements I referred to." There's "it strokes with", it's a private conference by private individuals; with government officials participating in private capacity; in the same way that a private conference to "Build the Wall" that the Republican politician might likewise visit doesn't really substantially claim anything about the US's actions or intentions, this isn't evidence as to what Israel's intentions are. Failure to punish incitement to genocide (which the ICJ explicitly ordered Israel to do) presumably constitutes prima facie evidence of genocidal intent.
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Jan 29, 2024 23:05
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Failed Imagineer posted:Good to see the Biden campaign going all-out to rescue their tanking Muslim voter outreach Christ, is that even legal? Guess Biden really is going with the "we don't need any Arab/Muslim/under-30 votes!" strategy.
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Jan 30, 2024 22:19
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Main Paineframe posted:It's not illegal to deny someone entrance to a political rally, not even if a Twitter account with 50 followers posts a video of themselves heckling a campaign volunteer for two minutes straight. Isn't it generally illegal to deny people access to anything that would otherwise be open to the public on the basis of religion?
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Jan 30, 2024 23:03
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