this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
19 points (100.0% liked)
Politics
10248 readers
285 users here now
In-depth political discussion from around the world; if it's a political happening, you can post it here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
yeah, you completely misunderstood what I'm saying.
this is a framing of the problem that I often see from apologists of people like Biden - that his critics want him to "do more".
as if politics can be simplified down to a big dial with "do nothing" on one end, and "do lots of stuff" on the other, and critics simply want the dial turned higher.
in this oversimplification, if you can paint criticism of Biden as "he should have done more" then that criticism can be refuted with "no, look at all the things he did". which is what you're trying to do here. I say Biden has no principles, and you try to refute that with "no, look at this bill that he signed".
what I'm actually complaining about is Biden and other Democrats doing the wrong thing.
Biden approved a bunch of oil drilling. I would have preferred him to do less. less would have been an improvement. less would have been consistent with the Democrats' supposed principled opposition to climate change.
Biden approved (and expanded) a bunch of weapons shipments to Israel. again, I wanted him to do less.
the "do more" vs. "do less" framing of politics is so simplistic that it would get you a bad grade in a high school civics class. the actual question is, when Democrats do something, what are they doing and why are they doing it. is the thing they are doing good or bad.
You said the Democrats have no principles, in terms of how they campaign. I said, more or less, that that's true. But also, in terms of Biden specifically, he actually does seem to have a lot of principles in terms of what he did in office. With Gaza as one glaring and war-criminal exception.
I have no idea where you got this idea that I look at "more stuff" and "less stuff" as the two options or why you talked down to me so extensively about the idea that that's how I look at it. Clearly, hopefully, we both want more good stuff and less bad stuff, and it's just a matter of talking about what stuff was good and what stuff was bad.
I think it's interesting but maybe not surprising that you totally ignored my pretty detailed arguments about income and climate policy, and just kept talking to me as if I hadn't made them. Feel free to read them, they're pretty interesting, whether or not you feel like addressing them on any level with me specifically.
the topic of this thread is the genocide in Gaza, Biden's complicity in it, and the response to that from Democratic voters.
as is typical of Biden apologists, you've tried to minimize it, and deflect from it, by bringing up non-sequiturs.
I haven't taken the bait, and tried to avoid letting the thread about genocide get derailed into a thread about section 403b1 of the Inflation Reduction Act or whatever.
and yeah, I'm sure that's very disappointing. my thoughts and prayers are with you in this difficult time.
maybe you'll get the response you're looking for if you started a thread for "let's talk about all the amazing things in Biden's four years that didn't involve children having limbs amputated without anesthesia"
yeah, Biden was an amazing president, if you ignore the genocide that he supported.
Mussolini made the trains run on time. Hitler boosted the German economy by acquiring more farmland. Slobodan Milošević probably had some ideas about progressive tax policy or something.
genocide denial isn't just "I deny that genocide is happening". it's more pernicious than that. it can also take the form of aggressively changing the subject. mention that 6 million Jewish people died in the Holocaust, and some Holocaust deniers will dispute that directly, but others of them will jangle "lots of other people died too" keys in front of your face as an attempted distraction.
I have a pro-Israel friend, when I talked to him about how Palestinians in the West Bank are forbidden from collecting rain water he didn't deny it, he just changed the subject to talk about the incredible advances that Israeli scientists have made in water-efficient irrigation techniques.
I'd urge you to consider that your comments have the effect of this sort of "soft" genocide denial, most likely without you intending it at all.
Correct.
Not really. Or, I mean, I know you brought those things into it, but the main topic of the thread was the "uncommitted" voters and whether or not they made a mistake.
Then, you brought other arguments into it, including "Democrats have no principles", abortion, immigration, Lina Khan, and Black Mirror. I responded to the new arguments you brought up and you became unhappy, suddenly, that we weren't talking about Gaza anymore, and refused to respond to my response to what you said.
I responded directly about Biden and Trump vis-a-vis genocide, when we were talking about genocide. Trump is infinitely worse, vis-a-vis genocide. Someone who cares about genocide and doesn't want to change the subject should be panicked about the prospect of Trump winning, even if the alternative is a Democrat. That is precisely the topic of this comments thread, before you changed the subject, aggressively, to "Democrats."
I do generally agree with your "perniciousness" argument. In particular, something like saying "Trump’s illegal calls for ethnic cleansing are horrific, but" should be a screaming red flag that the sentence needs to stop before the "but" comes in. Or maybe be finished up with "so it would obviously be a crisis if he gained power, so we should stop that."