You need to keep reading my posts until you get it through your head that I didn’t pick 5% or 1% or 0.1% because there was an estimate of increased casualties, it’s just an expression of the degradation being marginal. None of the numbers mean anything. One is worse (Trump), but on this issue not by a lot, and when someone is voting emotionally because they know people who have been killed, they may not be in the head space to see a small difference as more important than their anger.

You can talk about passionless objective voters calculating death percentages all you want, but that was never the topic of conversation. I’m not in that population, I made my calculation and a little less death is worth it, but I don’t blame anyone who lost a relative, watched Harris and Biden barely even give lip service to them and their community, and then told them to go fuck themselves. Haha, leopard sure ate their faces, what idiots.

“Hey, I hear an absolutely horrible and heartbreaking thing is happening, time to get in some election commentary” isn’t cynicism, it’s “told ya so”.

I think the masses of voters who are much less easy to influence. They’re not on Lemmy debating the topic or waiting for a community leader to decide the strategy. They probably didn’t even do any sort of deep game theory about playing chicken and scaring the Democrats. They just got more pissed off as the news came through, as the Democrats made excuses and acted like nothing needed to change, and as people in their community reported deaths. We can debate and shout and rationalize here all we want, we can suppress the topic for the greater good, and all that will have zero impact on electorate-level perceptions. They’re not here, there are too many for us to individually convince to change their mind, and they’re probably not even open to listening to a coldly rational argument about lesser evils and other topics.

Even the people organizing these campaigns didn’t have the influence to change their votes. Uncommitted endorsed Harris! But the whole thing was never in their control. They can only report the temperature they’re feeling in the community and suggest moves they think would help get people back into the tent. Those Democratic operatives and elected officials should have the potential to influence Harris. They have names people know, and phone numbers to people of importance. If she was so corrupt and blocked off that even they couldn’t reach her then we kind of do need the reckoning that could come from such an abject failure to keep the coalition together. There’s no “push her to be better after the election” in that case.

That’s what I did. Here’s two in easy form:

Topic: “Israeli drones shooting children in Gaza deliberately ‘day after day’, UK surgeon tells MPs”:

You know what would help this situation? Letting a fascist become President of the United States. Again.

Topic: “Continuing ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Campaign, Israel Blows Past US Deadline for Gaza Aid”

Don’t worry, just like how it was only fair that Ukraine and American minorities get genocided if Gaza was going to get genocided, abstaining voters have likewise decided it’s only fair for the West Bank to suffer genocide if Gaza is going to suffer genocide.

Current genocide happening, but let’s instead talk about how it’s somehow going to be worse in January because the real importance is the election.

“I think it is clear that Congress has a responsibility to act. We have legal tools here. And as I said, we cannot approve the sale of arms to a country that is in violation of our own laws on this."

F15s were just the next thing to be sent.

Are fighter jets not “arms”? They were just the next arms transfer being talked about at the time.

It’s not a “right” figure, it’s an expression of small differences. Stop trying to do math and just read what I’m writing. 99 vs. 100, 99.9 vs. 100, really bad vs. slightly more bad, whatever expression you’d prefer. The difference in impact is limited because Biden has presented practically no restriction or resistance.

In the last day this story has been posted 4 times with heavy engagement on each post. And whenever every anything related to Israel and Gaza has a glib “told-ya-so”/“it’s going to be worse in January!” comment.

I’m not counting bodies, I’m saying the relative dedication to genocide is not significantly different in impact. The material difference from Biden is literally just the 2000 lb. bombs, with an unquantifiable and unreliable hope that Democrats would snap out of it and start doing better. Hope meant it was worth trying for, because a change could be a big deal, but very likely the real difference in death come January 20th is going to be minimal compared to the death that Biden has already overseen and allowed.

A useful aspect of Lockdown mode (on top of it potentially being quick) is that you can still get into the camera without unlocking it (for me it’s a double tap on the power). When you’re locked down they can’t navigate to your photos, but you might want to be able to record things.

I honestly thought that they’d eventually come around because of just how bad Trump was going to be for democracy, and moreover for the people they cared about. Sadly, they were so devoted to their game of chicken that some of their loved ones will pay for it.

The problem in this is that you can substitute either the Harris campaign or the Muslim voters for “they”, and far too few people are applying it to the people with power. It seems inconceivable to these people that politicians actually need to address the concerns of the people they want to vote for them. They’re like some sort of unknowable force without agency or responsibility. It’s always the little guy’s fault for not coming around to the whims of the politician.

What makes it all worse is that on one side you have a population with good reason to be acting emotionally and the other you have someone just making a calculation that they just didn’t think they were worth it. Everyone shares blame for this result, but I get acting emotionally when you’re being ignored by power while they send weapons to kill your families. I don’t have any grace for sociopathic Democrats who would rather chase Republicans than take a moral stance for a constituency that voted for them in the past.

Biden literally isn’t stopping the starvation tactic now. There was a red line, they crossed it, and he said “nevermind”. So what exactly is going to be different under Trump? From another story, Trump is going to release the 2000 lb. bomb shipments. It’s literally the only thing Biden has denied them. I’d estimate 5% is the difference is between killing people with starvation, disease, and 500 lb. bombs and starvation, disease, and 2000 lb. bombs.

Congratulations, you told the Dems you weren’t going to vote for them, and now are surprised they ignored what you wanted.

This is such a completely broken and backward way to think about politics, but even so, the entire time representatives from that community (Democrats trying to get Harris elected) were trying to get them to do anything to head this off. At no point was there a “well, we’re just never going to vote for you so look elsewhere”, but that didn’t stop the campaign for prioritizing literal Republicans over previously Democratic constituencies with unsurprisingly bad results.

And I am a non-Muslim Harris voter, but this liberal tendency to blame minorities for the failures of existing power structures cannot be suppressed.

The whole premise of this being a news story, and a story that receives reliable engagement and gets injected into every story about Lebanon and Palestine is that these votes of these people have meaningfully caused the problems we’re all going to experience. A similar amount of ink is not being spread about any other group, and certainly not about all the mundane white assholes who have been voting for the people who harm their communities year after year.

And be honest, we’re looking at like 5% more genocide than Biden. We aren’t exactly going from Gandhi to Hitler on this issue. The Harris opportunity was always a secret hope that she was better than what she was willing to say. And like, a hope is better than none at all, but if she just followed what she said and didn’t change anything, none of us would be seriously asking ourselves how we could have missed the signs.

In my feed this story has shown up multiple times (more than any other group), each with a cavalcade of engagement, and “haha, more genocide” statements show up on every story about Palestine. They’re the group with the best excuse for “well that was dumb, but I get it” (their families are literally being killed by American weapons), but despite being marginalized as small and unimportant for months are now being covered as the post facto cause of failure, without anyone even recognizing that this was being predicted by Democratic party members well in advance as the obvious result of just trying to ignore the genocide.

First, I’m not the guy you were replying to.

Second, there may be a limit to what the United States can do in Gaza, but we know for sure Biden didn’t ever even try to reach it. It’s a much more strained interpretation to believe a highly empathic person cared deeply about the harm he was causing and did practically nothing to reduce it than to believe someone who has spent their entire life pursuing greater personal power, including multiple times where he supported wars in the Middle East, might be a bit of a sociopath. Making the former work requires inventing these unobservable stresses and reasons to explain why a seemingly immoral response is in fact secretly moral, while the latter lines up with our general understanding of people at the highest levels of power and the plain observations. The morality of a genocide is not complex.

And people in the community were warning for months that this was the consequence of refusing to denounce genocide. But somehow you only want to blame the racial and religious out group who can’t even be credibly blamed for losing the election. You guys were claiming for months they weren’t important and should be ignored, and now that the election is over and the thing Democratic leaders were warning of happened, suddenly it’s all their fault?

Sure seems weird that this level of glee over predictable bad things happening seem hyperfocused on the racial out group with the best reason to vote emotionally.

I do take issue that you think he doesn’t care, at a human level I just don’t think that’s true.

How would you have any read on his personal feelings at all? And why would you care that they’re being besmirched? His actions are what matter to the world and the only path by which any of us has to judge him.

Susan Collins expressed concerns, everything’s going to be ok folks!