Where is the outrage? Where have all the “humans” gone? Israel slaughtered over 300 innocent civilians in Gaza last night. Most of them women and children.
None of those with #Ukraine, #Canada, #Mexico and #EU flags on their profile raising their voice condemning this outrageous crime.
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The sheikh wandered around the city with a lamp
I’m tired of all the devils and the death, and seeking one human
They said it cannot be found, we have searched, As we said before
That which cannot be found I desire
Rumi
دی شیخ با چراغ همی گشت گرد شهر
کز دیو و دد ملولم و انسانم آرزوست
گفتند یافت می نشود جسته ایم ما گفت
آن که یافت می نشود آنم آرزوست
#poetry #Rumi #Gaza #Inhumanity #Death #politics #Israel #Genocide #WarCrime
@palestine@lemmy.ml @palestine@a.gup.pe @israel @iran
Has there been progress in the US since way back in Reagan’s time?!
Because at so many levels, from inequality and the collapse of social mobility to widespread civil society surveillance and support for Genocide abroad, the US has been constantly regressing for decades both under Democrats and Republicans.
I mean, the last actual American President passing measures that one could call “progress” was JFK. Even Obama was the President that ordered the highest number of drone murders whilst in office of all and decided that the way to save the economy after the 2008 Crash was to protect asset owners and large financial institutions - the rich, not the rest - resulting in the steep increase in social inequality and final collapse of social mobility in the US of the last decade, and which created the fertile ground for the growth of support for the likes of Trump.
From my viewpoint as an European, you’re just defending a slower regression, which is understandable but it ain’t “progress” (last chance at that was Bernie Sanders and his primary was very overtly torpedoed by the DNC), and it’s also understandable that others with strong moral convictions and even personal reasons connected to America’s continued descent into evil aren’t supporting any evil in America, even the “lesser” one that slows down the regression a bit.
You would have been absolutelly right if this election was indeed progress vs regression, but it wasn’t, it was one Genocide-endorsing candidate who chose to try to attract far-right votes by getting cozier with the likes of the Cheney family versus a Genocide-endorsing candidate who is openly a far-right populist - two forms of evil differing mainly in delivery style and how fast do they want to go rightward - you blaming people for chosing “none of the above” is pure tribalism.
There’s been both progress and regression. To try to paint it that black and white doesn’t work. Even if we do agree that it is a slower regression, that is still the first step to progress here. That would be the same thing as saying that slowing damage of climate change would be meaningless.
Unless we start murdering billionaires in the streets, this is what we have.
I’m sorry but in over 2 decades of observing US politics from outside as I saw the country go from what I admired as a kid in the 80s into a shit show, I’ve seen a ton of “mild when it could’ve been heavy” regression being celebrated as “good” and a lot of one step forward and two steps back, but never any actual real, sustained progress.
Sure, you can claim that, for example, Clinton’s economic boom after he tore down the Glass-Steagal Act was “progress”, as long as you ignore the other consequences of it, namely the 2008 Crash, and the Recession after it and rise in inequality and collapse of social mobility.
If you use the traditional technique of sleazy politicians of claiming successes as theirs and failures as somebody else’s, they’re all making progress, but if you look at the trend line on things like inequality it’s been consistently getting worse, just slower at times.
And no, that’s not all you have: you can become politically active and along with other similarly minded people start trying to take back the Democrat Party at the local level - start supporting non-AIPAC bough candidates in the next Congressional and Senatorial Primaries, do leafleting campaigns reminding everybody of the evil-doing of many of the sitting Democrat Congressmen and Senators (their voting record is open and them receiving money from AIPAC is known for many). At a national level it’s hard for non-billionaire individuals to move public opinion but at local level it’s a lot easier.
After all, most polls seem to show that the actual Democrat voter mainly have good values, so it seems to me that it’s the Democrat Political Leadership who are misaligned with the principles of the Democrat Party voters, no doubt because they can run their campaigns on “vote lesser evil” and there will be an over-abundance of people spreading the message that “We must vote for <Democrat candidate which is slightly less evil than Republican candidate> so that the more evil candidate does not win, there is no other option” all the while the evil Democrat candidate won’t move in the slightest to not be evil.
Although I agree with just about all of this, were talking about what happened this election. Local race influence is at minimum a decade out, if we’re still even able to vote when those times come. the right has been actively kneecapping people’s ability to vote for a long time. My argument is that it is not perfect, no where near it, but far easier to bounce back from than far right total control. That’s the argument, and it’s an easy one.
Yeah, well, what happened this election is the product of people like you not putting the effort which could have been done way back in the mid 2010 when the consequences of the policies chosen to “save the Economy” after the 2008 Crash were starting to get pretty obvious.
The Democrat Party has been using “lesser evil” as their core campaign strategy all the whole becoming increasingly evil since way back and this time around there wasn’t even the excuse that a guy like Trump could never get elected because he already had been elected once before.
(Also and judging by how they’re voting, Democrats have always been relaxed about the possibility of Trump in the White House, which would explain why they persisted in not moving an inch politically to accommodate anti-Genocide and broader Leftwing demands - for all their alarmist talk they were much more willing to lose the election to Trump than to lose AIPAC funding or their non-executive board memberships and speech circuit rewards for being friendly to certain very rich people).
For any sufficiently principled person, the policies of the Democrat party since way back when Obama decided to “save the Economy” after the 2008 Crash by protecting the Asset Owners whilst letting those who work for a living to rot should have been enough to prompt them to become politically active, or at least the first Trump victory should’ve. In fact it was the British version of such policies (as I was living in Britain at the time) that prompted me to become politically active about 8 years ago in a country which wasn’t even my country of birth, even before the whole Brexit mess.
At the very least you should have been heavily criticizing the Democrat Party leadership during all this time, both on the evil things they did and the good things they refuse to do. An argument for withholding criticism can only really be made for the period during the electoral campaign, not for before and most certainly not for after it.
Truly principled people who only voted Democrat because they felt they had no other option are right now laying it out thick on that party’s leadership for what they did, are doing and are refusing to do, not coming out to defend them.
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All that said, political activism is something you start investing in sooner rather than later, because even local changes require a lot of people to change their minds and that takes time to make (plus if a movement against them starts growing sitting politicians will take note and might change the way they act), so you start now, not spend the next couple of years wallowing in helplessness only to get to the next election, be faced with an almost-Fascist Democrat candidate all over again and claim “there’s nothing we could have done, we just have to vote for this one to stop the pure-Fascist candidate”.
You don’t just have to help the public become aware of certain things, you have to find those who feel like you, organize and start trying things out to spread awareness even before even truly starting to change public perception of certain subjects and Democrat party representatives, so it takes years, not months.
The worst that can happen is that nothing comes out of it, but then again you might make a difference if you do try, whilst if you don’t try anything at all, nothing is exactly what you’ll achieve and in a few years’ time you’ll be repeating a variant of the very same claims of helplessness you’re making now.
Drone murders was a right wing lie. Obama killed fewer than any modern President except Carter.
Drones were not yet available in mass production during Bush Jr so Bush killed hundreds of thousands with regular bombs. Obama killed only hundreds of civilians. So to twist Obama’s record into something bad, right wing media talked endlessly about drones, while completely ignoring the drastically lower number of deaths. It would be like calling Bush Sr the Stealth bomber killer because Bush Sr was the first to really use Stealth fighters in the first Gulf War.
Trump killed more in his first year with drones than Obama did in 8 years.
https://airwars.org/research/civilian-deaths-by-us-president-in-iraq-and-syria/
But as Joseph Goebels proved, if you repeat a lie long enough people will believe the lie.
Your link is for something else altogether than the campaign of murder by predator drone that Obama conducted in Pakistan, which if remember it correctly included blowing up a whole wedding to get to 1 man.
Frankly I don’t care if he was the worst, the 2nd worst or the 3rd worst: the problem is that he still signed the orders for quite a lot of outright murders (no due process involved) and since I’m not a member of his political tribe and thus don’t have a special moral discount for the chiefs of the tribe, his campaign of murder by drone puts him in the “Evil” category right alongside the rest.
Then there is the whole part of how he chose to save the Finance Industry after the Crash (which, me being in the Industry in London at the time, observed with quite a lot of attention).
But hey, cheers for quoting Goebels to defend a guy who ordered a campaign of murders in Pakistan: it’s always pretty special when an American Neoliberal quotes Nazis to the rest of us to defend their own tribe’s murdering leaders.
My link is total murders by President.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47480207
Making 10 deaths equal to 10,000 deaths is the same bullshit logic that Israel uses to justify their murders.
By repeating the Obama drone striker propaganda, you are acting as a mouthpiece for Trump.
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_the_United_States_drone_strikes#Approvals_of_drone_strikes
This, by the way, means that in that link of yours, counts for combatant deaths is almost certainly counting “combatants” in Obama’s very special way, and ditto for all other reports of combatant deaths from the Obama era.
So you’re either an useful idiot for believing the numbers, massaged by adjusting the meaning of the words, of the political propaganda from the Obama era (and changing the meaning of words to massage the numbers is a doublespeak technique in the same way as Trump redefining of words, just less brazen and more indirect) or you’re so tribalist you’re basically a sociopathy and are knowingly defending with falsehoods a guy who ordered the deaths of thousands of people.
The former is excusable, the latter is not.