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Yes. You have grasped it.
If someone's protesting with the most likely result being better outcomes for the Palestinian people (because of useful pressure on the Democratic party, or even better some longer-term reform to our broken system that leaves these as the only two options), then I'm in favor of it.
If someone's protesting in such a way that the most likely result is Trump winning the election and making things 10 times worse for the Palestinians, then I'm against it.
I have no idea why that would be weird or surprising, but yes. There's a little bit of overlap between those two goals, and it's impossible to know the future or the impact of any particular action definitively, but a lot of real-world situations are messy. Them's the breaks.
I describe as "useful idiots" people who are falling for deliberate propaganda which is being deployed to turn them unconditionally against the Democrats, alongside a lot of objectively false criticism, producing only a vague level of improvement to the Democrats' behavior but a strong result of making it more likely that Trump will win, yes. If you're not doing that them I'm fine with you. And I have no idea, as I said, how many (if any) of the DNC protestors will fall into that category in practice. I just know how I categorize people based on the outcomes they're promoting, and I know I see people in that "useful idiot" category on Lemmy. I don't think you're one of them, for the record; that's why I laid out some of the specific accounts I'd describe as more specifically promoting propaganda as opposed to good activism and tried to be specific about it.
Hope this all is helpful; glad we could clear it up.
Jesus christ. Do you consider US culpability in the Palestinian Genocide a part of this 'deliberate propaganda'? At what point does someone protesting against democratic involvement and complacency in Israeli war crimes become someone who is protesting against democrats generally? Is there any grey area that you're willing to acknowledge between these two categorical binaries you've proposed? Can there be a legitimate protest against the democrats, that hurts their odds at winning, but doesn't directly result in a change of policy? If the democrats and the protestors both refuse to bend to the other, is it categorically the protestors' fault if and when trump wins? Even if it isn't apparent that they've lost explicitly because of those protestors? Is it also the fault of the protestors if the democrats adopt a pro-palestinian policy in response to the protestors, AND THEN lose? What i'm gathering from you is that it is ALWAYS the protestors fault for the loss, no matter what the democrats do in response.
Fuck off with your electoral reductionism. The democrats are not helpless here, and they could absolutely be fighting to save palestinian lives and it is 100% their own fault if voters decide they can't support them over it. They are welcome to weigh the electoral calculus to predict how voters might react to their policies but it is completely their own fault if they've chosen the wrong ones.
No
When they stop either conditioning their lack of support on Democratic behavior, or advocating for voting reform or some other strategy which can lead to effective replacement of the Democrats with something better. Either one of those sounds fine and sensible to me, but when they reach the point of saying, functionally, "well if the Democrats aren't doing what I want then I will let the Republicans win even if they are 10 times worse at the things I hold as priorities in the world," that to me stops making sense.
I think if you're a Palestinian who is still alive right now, and a protestor "on your behalf" enables Trump to come to power, and then Trump supports someone who kills you, the idea that the protestor was mad that the Democrats weren't doing enough for you before Trump and Netanyahu cooperated to kill you would be cold comfort. I think this whole "harm reduction isn't worth doing" idea is a childish and entitled reaction from someone who is safely far away from that harm that is very real to very real people in the real world, who have the luxury of poo pooing the entire idea of predicting outcomes in the real world and strategizing how to get them.
Yes, quite a substantial one.
Yes. If it's only hurting their odds of winning, and not even trying to change their policy, then it's suspect to me, but as you said there's quite a substantial grey area and it's not easy to tell ahead of time what protest might result in what outcome. You have to just kind of do what you can and hope that you've worked it out what is going to help the Palestinians and what is going to hurt them, and do the first and not the second as best as you can figure it out.
Not categorically, no. The Democrats have a lot of responsibility, the Republicans and Netanyahu obviously have quite a bit more. The protestors might have some responsibility, but depending on how they were protesting, potentially not much at all.
Honestly, I'm less concerned with assigning "blame" after the fact than I am with strategizing what I could do, or what someone else could do, to get better outcomes. Like I say, I consider this whole thing of it being real important "whose fault it is" when something horrifying happens to be an entitled mentality from someone who's not directly in danger. Mostly when people's families' lives are threatened they're more focused on "how can I keep them safe" than they are on "whose fault will it be if someone comes to power who kills them, and how can I make sure it won't be this person's fault but instead this other person's fault."
So this brings up a really good point. To me, it makes a lot more sense to help the Palestinians by educating the American people about what's going on in Palestine, so the Democrats won't have to decide (to any degree) between enabling war crimes and losing the election.
A lot of protests right now are serving a double purpose -- one, they're bringing awareness to the issue with the American people (and it's working), and two, they're threatening the Democrats electorally and forcing them to change their calculus of what types of Israel policy they should do if they don't want to lose the election from the other direction (and that's working, too). Both of those are good things. I keep saying that, and you keep insisting for some reason that I must have a problem with them. I guess because it makes the point that you're trying to say easier if I am just against all protestors. As I keep saying, I am not.
I don't care whose "fault" it is. I am talking about what actions are good (in terms of creating better outcomes in the future), and what actions are bad (in terms of getting people killed). Like I said, this emphasis on "fault" having any significant importance is the mindset of someone who isn't watching their family getting killed.
Yea, that's the point. But you continuously allude to some "other" type of pro-palestinian protestor, who is putting the pressure squarely on those most directly responsive to their protest, as "useful idiot", or "bad actor", or alluding to them having abuser logic for placing agency on the people currently providing Israel military aid and not, weirdly, on themselves. You even use a double-standard when discussing online behavior: in one instance, the correct way to Do Activism^tm^ is to convince the american public to sway public opinion, and then in the next you hand-wave away activity that is directed at swaying public opinion because 'you doubt the DNC reads your comments on Lemmy'.
That, OR, you're trying to distinguish between types of pro-palestinian protestors using some weird, "that's not gonna help" classification system that's opaque and/or ambiguously defined, so that at any given moment someone saying "democrats haven't done enough" can be cast aside as "other" or "bad actor". It is almost as if you are defending a naieve enthusiasm from water being thrown on it, simply because you value that enthusiasm even while there is a veritable gulf between what is needed from democrats on Israel and what they are doing. No, you may not return to your brunch, look at the shit that still needs cleaning up. Protestors are there to remind libs (who, as you pointed out, are safe from harm themselves no matter what the democratic policy is on Israel) that the work is not yet done. This includes people on Lemmy who are serving you reminders that things continue to be shit, despite what little democrats have actually done.
And it's not even like the Democrats can't, also, campaign for that change being worked toward. You're pretending as if the desired policy must grow from grass-roots before democrats can take action, but the democrats already know what the right thing to do is, it is just politically inconvenient to have to do it right now. A huge part of the problem is that the Democrats actively use the bully pulpit to deflect blame and run cover for Israel - when they should be using it to make the case to the american public why things need to change.
Literally anything to disembody the problem away from your personal electoral goals, while also claiming to support the issue being raised. It is the quintessential 'white moderate' take that MLK discusses in Letter from Birmingham, but you're so blinded by self-confidence that you couldn't possibly see it.
Okay so I just deleted a whole bunch of stuff. Honestly, let's just get to the root of it.
No - I meant you. You're safe from harm. You can advocate for something that might get Trump elected, and I think it's safe to say no fighter jets will commence carpet bombing anywhere where your family is, if it happens.
I'm safe from harm too. I've flown close enough to see little flashes in the distance, I briefly dated someone who grew up in a refugee camp, I've spent a little bit of time staying with someone who was captured and tortured at one point in his life. That kind of secondhand stuff is as close as I've come. I don't want to come any closer. I have my safe, privileged life. But I've experienced this stuff second hand; I've been friends with people who were crippled by these policies and decisions, had the arc of their lives changed without their consent.
You keep bringing it back to shit that doesn't matter. I don't care whose fault it is. I don't care what you think is opaque or ambiguously defined, or what frameworks you feel like are too complicated to want to spend the mental effort on, so you use simple ones instead. I care about dying people, and how we change it; what's going to work, and what isn't.
I can dig up 10 different times when I've been doing exactly that, on Lemmy. Do you want me to? If it's useful for you to hear it, I'm happy to show it to you.
I thought about it for a while, and I think the reason we're not seeing eye to eye is this: The Democrats are not my friends. No one in Washington is my friend. When I'm saying, I want the Democrats to win this upcoming election, it's purely because that will keep some people alive who will die under Trump. There's a very few people in Washington, of any party, that I actually think have any kind of human standing on anything, that I would "support" in the sense of hey I like this person, I want them in charge. Kamala Harris isn't one of them.
I feel like -- tell me if I'm wrong -- you're interpreting all this that I am saying like I "support" Kamala Harris, and you're trying to get me not to. Like I think what she's doing is sufficient and you need to debunk that. You can stop. I don't. Put it this way: If one of my neighbors regularly made phone calls and ordered people to be killed, I wouldn't hang out with them. That's pretty much everyone in power in Washington: Biden, Harris, McCain, Trump, Adam Schiff, you get the idea. I look at them all (again, with a very small number of exceptions) as almost like these dangerous robots who somehow have this unimaginable power.
I'm not saying that I think, yes let's change the system and get these fuckin maniacs out of power and also let's Kamala Harris win this particular election, because of any of the stuff you are debunking in your message. Most of your message, I agree with. I am saying blah blah also let's Kamala Harris win this particular election because according to the only other available alternative, a whole fuck a lot (more -- much more) people will die. That's not imaginary -- it is real as you or I. Figuring out how to make a non performative change and what will work and what won't is important.
If you show me a strategy "hey here's how we can get better than the Democrats in power" I will start supporting it instantly. It feels like -- again, tell me if I'm wrong -- you think that what you're advocating is that, and I'm refusing to support it and so I must love Democrats or something. That's not the case. I just don't think what you are advocating will work (definitely not in the short run which is when most of the Palestinians will die). If you want to talk about, why not, how can we get something that will work, let's rap. But -- I don't know how many times I have to say it -- stop telling me how important it is to arrive at something better than the Democrats. You can silence that, and move on from it, or just keep wasting your time typing it over and over again, I guess, if you want to, but that's what you're doing when you type it.
Doesn't that make sense? Or no? You tell me.
No, and I find this reduction to be a huge part of the problem with most of the political discourse on Lemmy. There's this intense urge to reduce or interpret discourse into 'support' or 'don't support', usually electorally and usually as a strict binary. To most Americans, the most interaction they have with politics is voting, sometimes even just for the general. IDGAF if anyone 'supports' Kamala/Joe/Dems, whatever that means. I view who people end up voting for as almost incidental to the broader direct action that I think is the true driver of political change.
That's not to suggest you're making a reference to that binary - you're clearly speaking more broadly. But even the way you're interpreting direct action through its "actual" electoral result is frustrating. Because the people protesting (even the people on lemmy who seem (to you) dead-set against democrats) contain multitudes, and most of them will end up voting for an option that's not perfectly aligned to their principles in the end (because there are none who are). That's not the point of direct action. You (or maybe not you specifically, but liberals generally) complain that people repeatedly casting criticism without proposing an electoral solution are just fanning the flames of division, but what they're doing is creating a kind of "positive tension" within the electorate that the democrats will eventually need to address if it's allowed to grow. Democrats can't do x or y policy change because "it just isn't popular", but it isn't popular because people aren't being confronted with the results of the policy that needs changing. Protesting is a part of that, but so is posting on social media about it. Those are doing the same thing.
But what I specifically take issue with is your objection to protests that have real and legitimate standing, simply on some theoretical calculation where policy doesn't change but the damage to voter enthusiasm remains, and the "fault" **implicit ** in that judgement. I realize you've made explicit statements of affirmation toward Palestinian protests generally, but you've still defended this abstracted way of assessing advisable/in-advisable protests independent from the 'righteousness' of the cause itself. From your perspective, it seems that even a protest that is completely justified in its cause can be viewed negatively (and liable to accusation, labels and insults) if your personal judgment has determined it will only cause damage and not result in policy change. It's a form of dismissal that comes from an intense sense of paternalism that rhetorically allows you to identify yourself with the cause but avoids the uncomfortable work of reflecting on your own complicity. Even if you object to that complicity on grounds that you do direct action yourself, blah blah blah - you're also vocally defending a system that enables that type of subjugation you're fighting against. (I can already hear you objecting to this framing on the grounds that you want the system to change, and I'll just say it now that i'm not talking in abstraction. I'm saying you're defending the electoral system by insisting we must conduct ourselves in a way so we can preserve your desired electoral outcome)
Funny. I don't care about whose fault 'it' is, either! I don't care if you've judged a form of protest as ineffectual or not, even. I care about dying people, and the real ways in which our system of power enables and supports the killing of those people. I think the point of direct action is to tie the policy outcomes of the system to the people acting on that system's behalf in order to pressure them, and tempering that direct action around preserving a desired electoral result is antithetical to that rhetorical goal. You cannot pressure political agents into change if you're undercutting the protest by implicitly assigning electoral responsibility to that protest. I know 'you don't care' about fault, but you're still drawing a causality between the protest and the electoral outcome, when the explicit goal of that protest is to draw causality between the electoral outcome and the policy.
No, that is not what i'm advocating. It sure would be great if we had a better system, but placing our political goals behind that fantastic revolutionary goal first is just a way of deferring our problems to a different time, a better season. We have the system we have, and trying to change that system (even simply influence the outcome of that system) without damaging it is like trying to box with both hands tied behind your back. Democrats won't do their job better until they're made to swim in their own shit, without trying to white-wash it or rhetorically dance around their own complicity in them. Protest helps to reflect the impact of those policies back on the office, and a side effect of that is damaging their electoral chances.
I think judging a form of protest based on its hypothetical electoral impact isn't just pointless, it neuters and subverts it. It isn't 'abuser logic' to assign responsibility for electoral losses on the policies being protested - if anything it's holding the 'abuser' responsible for the harm they themselves are committing. By flipping the responsibility of that loss on protestors it rhetorically excuses democrats for their shit policy.
I hope that makes sense.