CleverOleg [he/him]

Just to add, the idea that western countries do not subsidize their exports is laughable. I don’t doubt that in many sectors, western governments - both now and in the past - have subsidized their industries to far greater degree than China ever has with theirs.

You might want to sit down for this but… Donald Trump is a big talker, and will usually bloviate well beyond what he’s actually capable of doing. Yeah of course, he uses more genocidal language but so what, how does that translate into action?

Biden has given Bibi everything he’s asked for. The administration has provided diplomatic cover for every single genocidal action that taken place. Weapons are sent to Israel without delay, to the point that supplies are getting stretched there’s talk about how Ukraine and Israel can’t both be supported (guess who’s losing out there btw). Every time Biden draws a red line, Bibi crosses it with zero consequences.

But as you correctly point out, there is really only one way a president could be MORE genocidal than Biden, and that’s by committing ground troops. I should point out that Biden has already done this with the recent THAAD deployment, but that’s not a massive commitment of personnel. But no, neither Harris nor Trump will be committing troops because not only would that end up being a disaster, but because doing so defeats the purpose of Israel. Israel exists in order to do America’s wetwork in the region. For reasons of both domestic and foreign policy, America can’t be seen as directly causing so much blood to spill in the region, so it gets outsourced to Israel. The CIA and State Dept know all this too well and neither Trump nor Harris are gonna cross them.

We know Trump supports …let’s call it “Genocide+”

We do know that? Biden and Harris are currently ok with the IOF sealing off an area with 400k+ people in it, hoping to starve them to death. No, if you’re going to claim Trump will do something more, be specific. Because outside of dropping a nuke on Gaza there isn’t much more that can be done, we’re at what essentially is maximum genocide that is reasonably possible.

I believe most people think Harris will make getting a permanent ceasefire and supporting a two state solution central tenets of her administration.

Oh wait, you’re serious. Oh you sweet summer child. I can even be mad at you. But not only do most people not believe this, most people know this is patently false because it IS false. Btw the reason people like Blinken and Harris bring up a 2 state solution is because Israel has made it functionally impossible.

This post is a good reminder why I need to sort by Local and not All.

I mean, they’re not exactly chanting “from the river to the sea” at rallies but they think the Israelis and Palestinians should each have their own state because “that’s fair”. They understand the Palestinian state has been under military occupation since they were little kids and that’s about as far as I’ve gotten.

I saw recently that the total number of deaths due to the “war on terror” is up to 4.5 million.

I had this realization yesterday, and not like this is some big insight but it was a new thought to me:

Most Americans have zero conception of “anti-imperialism” or “anti-colonialism”.

It’s not that most Americans knowingly approve of imperialism or colonialism. Or that they have a warped idea of what these terms mean. It’s that they have no idea what these concepts are or how they exist in history up to the present.

I like to think my parents are pretty good examples of the “median” (white) American. If you asked them what “colonies” were, they would say something like “well, in the past countries like Britain and France owned parts of Africa and Asia, but now they don’t anymore”. That’s it, that’s all they would able to explain. They have no idea that there was an anti-colonial struggle across many countries. They think Vietnam was just “the communists were trying to take over the world”, where “the communists” are not even specifically Vietnamese or Russian or Chinese, just a sort of blob of anthropomorphized ideology.

This bleeds into their present-day understanding of what’s happening in Gaza. Palestinians or really any brown people are just naturally violent for reasons unknown, so they get branded with the “terrorist” label and they don’t think any deeper than that. The conflict then becomes not an anti-colonial struggle or a people striving for liberation, but the bad “terrorists” who just want to do violence to the white people who look like they do and have democracy and capitalism and speak English so they must be good. This gets reinforced by the media which has now spent over 20 years pushing hard stories of Muslim or Arab “terrorists” who want to set off a nuke in an American shopping mall or whatever crap they watch of NCIS / CSI / JAG / Homeland / FBI (yes, there’s now a show that’s just called “FBI”).

The struggles that Mexico has had to endure are completely unknown to most Americans, so when AMLO or Sheinbaum get labeled as “autocrats”, (white) Americans will just accept it because of their own lack of knowledge plus inherent racism.

(Just to clarify, I’ve worked on my parents so they no longer think the above