“Half of the Israeli public is no longer in favor of the war,” one friend told me Saturday night as we witnessed thousands of Israelis take to the streets to protest the Israeli government under the slogan, “Elections Now.” “Yes, but the other half is all-in, and REALLY in favor,” responded his wife. “And they are the more powerful group.”
She, of course, is right. For months, reports of torture and rape have emerged from Israel’s military base turned torture camp, Sde Teiman, where Israel has imprisoned thousands of Palestinians without charge. I wrote about it in a previous diary earlier this month. Palestinians who have emerged from this torture camp refer to it as the “slaughterhouse” with horrendous tales of torture, rape, abuse, and sleep deprivation being meted out by Israeli prison guards. Nearly 30 Palestinians have died while in Sde Teiman and other prisons, according to the information provided to date.
And while the precise chain of events is unclear, what we do know is that the Israeli military advocate general decided to dispatch the military police to question nine Israeli soldiers on suspicion of gang-raping and sodomizing a Palestinian man from Gaza at Sde Teiman. The man was rushed to the hospital where he exhibited signs of rape, including a ruptured bowel and broken ribs. It would be a mistake to simply think that Israel’s actions in prisons like Sde Teiman came only after October. Since becoming Israel’s national security minister in 2022, ultranationalist Itamar Ben Gvir has made prisons his target, with him authorizing abuse against Palestinians. He has also called for the death penalty to solve problems of overcrowding.
Respectfully, what matters more to you: a politician's words or their deeds?
I'd wager my life savings that Kamala, once elected, will go back on her word and support funding for Israel, just as every president has done even as Israel has become more and more of an apartheid.
It's the best chance we've ever had. It would be foolish to punish her for stepping forward on this issue. It would just reinforce the status quo. If she goes back on it we're just in the same situation. But it's also possible that she actually holds Netanyahu accountable. She's the only choice that's even talked about doing that.
It's possible, but given how presidents have ruled over the last 40 years, exceedingly unlikely. POTUS candidates on the campaign trail make a lot of promises they have no intention of keeping.
Yeah. But one way to move the ball ideologically is to ~~eject~~ elect people saying the right things. Eventually they have to actually do something and not just say something.
If we give up or even try to vote for some 5d genius move where they said A so they mean B then all we ever get is the same old crap.
Edit- Damn Google... That's straight up evil.
Exactly right.
All you can do for yourself in this system is invest as much of your money as you can in the stock market, because that is going to be the primary focus of the person we elect, and the only way you'll get any real measure of representation.
That's still supporting an abusive system. That's possibly the brain of the abuser. We can not discard with one hand while clutching, with the other. To leave the abuser means making hard sacrifices, including any "benefits" that keep us bound to the abuser, because this benefits allow the abuser control.
We're not getting out without suffering. It's a matter of making the decision and having the grit to deal with the unpleasant, but intermediate, consequences. Anything else is lying to ourselves.
I keep telling people to leave the abusers and vote Green instead.
It's not a message that's generally received with any enthusiasm.
We can't tell anyone what to do, or should do. We can offer potential options for them and their egos to sort. We have our own stuff to sort with our own egos, and a major stumbling block seems to be getting out of our own ways, and out of our own comfort zones.
Personally, I don't even think it's that. I think it's programming, like how people are brought up with religion. The devotion to political party is very similar.
If we think of the Freudian paradigm of ID (instinctive drive/child self/ inner child, ego/middle self/in the driver's seat, and superego/God/parent self, "Mommy and Daddy tapes), this is true; and from my perspective, with the colloquial/Buddhist use of ego, it still ties in, in that it takes a a good deal of setting ego aside, to admit that cherished beliefs, perhaps from good parents, schools, therapists, religious institutions may have been mistaken, even when well-intentioned. Would you agree?
Until it all collapses right before millennials need it because we gave up working to change anything.
It collapses once every 10-15 years now.
If you're a smaller investor, it's good to have a percentage of your investment money set aside in savings to plan for this, because when it happens you can buy in to the stock market at a 90% discount.
So, $0 because my body is too broken to be commodified. Can't buy anyone's vote. Sad.
Sadly, that's absolutely true. Stories like yours are what I think of every time I hear there's been another hundred billion dollars sent off to another country's war from the US taxpayer.
And it will be that way for as long as we only elect capitalists.
To be kind of honest, I'd say that's still optimistic - I say they are going to raise the level of support to unprecedented levels. Of course, it would be the exact same thing if Trump won... the only difference being that (so-called) "progressives" wouldn't be falling over themselves to make all kinds of excuses for it.
You're probably right.
We have bipartisanship for the absolute worst things.
It's so sad you have given up on optimism. I haven't
I was optimistic in 2008 and even voted for Obama.
We saw how that turned out, and with respect to Kamala, I expect the reboot to even worse than original, given the state of things in this country.
It just sounds like you would have made this exact comment and line of attack no matter who the Democrats chose, meaning it has nothing to do with Kamala
These days, absolutely.
I don't think the Democratic or Republican candidates are anything more than useful idiots for the billionaire class, and I think the vast majority of their promises are outright lies.
We saw a great example of that over the last 2-3 years, with partisans defending very public cognitive breaks on the part of President Biden, who I personally think should be 25'd out. If he hadn't had that exceedingly embarrassing incident at the debate, the Democrats and Democratic voters would still be defending him.
The Obama and Trump presidencies killed any optimism I have for our country and system of government. Obama was reelected AFTER making sure the big banks suffered no ill effects of willfully destroying our economy for profit. Trump spent more than a year of his presidency (cumulatively) on vacation, and even sold the Oval Office for ad space. (And that was BEFORE he led a literal insurrection on the Capitol.)
It's difficult for me to understand anyone being optimistic, if you're looking at the last 44 years (and in particular, 16 years) with an objective eye.
Hot take: 90% of their promises fallen short are because of Republican representatives stonewalling them to make them look incompetent (because their voters don't follow logic). Vote the Republicans out, and they can get free reign to make real progress.
I don't think history bears this out, especially after Obama.
The reality is that, especially after Citizens United, our federal legislators are beholden to the billionaire class, and further, all of them are multi-millionaires. They choose to rule as conservatives because it benefits them and the people who fund their campaigns.
Why does history not bear this out? Because Obama had a brief slim majority?
Even having a 60% democratic majority doesn’t do what you think it does. The Democratic Party, thankfully, is not a hive mind. It’s normal for 15% of them to vote differently on a subject based on differing opinions. But Republicans will denounce a bill as illegal, immoral, and then still vote it in to tow the party line.
Obama had a supermajority.
I've heard all of the excuses for how powerless Democrats are.
After watching the ACA and the Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act pass with simple majorities, the excuses don't make sense anymore. There is a method to fulfill a president's promises, and they choose not to use it when they have the power to do so.
And notice that the Republicans just ignored the Parliamentarian, whom Democrats sometimes use as another excuse as to why they chose not to fulfill their promises.
That's not a matter of opinion. It's fact.
Yeah, you’ve heard the excuses. Just scared to respond to them, I suppose. The answer should be obvious: We don’t want a dictatorship.
I understand that in a symbolic sense.
The problem is that it doesn't matter for the majority of Americans, because they can legally be paid so little that the person we elect is immaterial to the day-to-day suffering they experience in our civilized republic. (2/3 of the US states still have a $7 minimum wage.)
And, that fact has remained true across two Democratic presidents who had total control of Congress, which means there's no reason to expect that it will be any different under a Harris presidency.
It's either Harris or fascism, and it sounds like you've already made your choice. Have fun being miserable! #KamalaHarris #BlueWave #NotGoingBack
Respectfully, it's not.
It's two sides of a single fascist coin, and none of this is fun for me. I have eighty-year old parents forced to drive for DoorDash (using my car) or starve.