To me this looks broadly similar to the arguments around the GWOT where the neocons were like "the solution to al qaeda is more imperialism" and people with a clue were like "well hold on there, wasn't al qaeda kind of a consequence of imperialism in the first place? So how is the solution more of the same thing that caused the problem?"
That's baaically how I'm reading the argument you're making about Israel. It's kind of like the Farm Boy protocol, rural people vote in the GOP reducing all of their quality-of-life indicators and then those indicators are evidence that the GOP actually needs to be given more unearned minority power in the system? Something is faulty here.
Here's the thing, in a now deleted reply I said thing to you. On both paragraphs. Like you writing like Bush doctrine toppling of
dictators imperialists will result the spontaneous bubbling and emergence of freedom. Or that Hamas is evidence we should give them more political power over all of Israel a la your second paragraph.
I think about my future sister-in-law. She's a minority immigrant in the country that hates minority immigrants from the country she's from. So who'd she vote for in her first election? Well her church told her.... anyway, guess this guy's platform? Anti gay, obviously, and anti immigrant. That just means her. She's the immigrant, from the target country of disdain. I'm glad she voted. She should practice and expect her enfranchisement. In her home country, they don't actually get to do that for real anymore. But Golly. Some people vote terribly. Hamas are the Republicans. Netanyahu is the Republicans. Her guy is the Republicans. What do we do? We give her one vote and pray to her God to tell her to read some books outside of the evangelical reading circuit.
Anyway back to writing my second long reply.
Ultimately all of this violence in the Middle East is being done so we can drive gas-burning cars without paying the real costs of doing so and pretend that makes us free.
So in the Musk thread you'll stop criticizing the cars themselves but instead begin hoping they succeed.
The question is what now. You say "stop assisting them until Palestine is free" which is okay. It's not the best but it's pretty good, and far from the worst. I guess I just see World War 3 a lot less likely if our side is really powerful. There's a And I see the progressive half of Israelis as worth protecting politically. They're not voting for this stuff. They protest it. It would be shame to lose that. That's the difference here. Every human matters but not every culture is equally healthy and contributing.
I'm all in on Palestinian Statehood. I can be convinced of a few formations. Sometimes I wonder how, like who knows, maybe the best way would be something really weird like Gaza and Israel form one state and the West Bank gets to be another. Maybe a two or three state solution makes sense. Maybe there's a good one state solution that doesn't end in a bloodbath. Some kind South Africa, German Reuinification story. Although South Africa is proving not to be the best example. Still better than apartheid.
Imperialism is bad from the get. It causes a lot of bad things. All sorts of ugliness. It empowers a lot of bad people and then other people to point and say "this is why they don't deserve a chance", who you should really know better than to imagine are me. That makes really sad and wonder why I write long posts if they are just to be forgotten and I get assigned to whatever convenient set of tropes is the idea of "other side".
It's ridiculous to think suggest I believe ability to do democracy comes from an skin color. That's pretty offensive. I won't take it personally, I don't think you mean it, but it's bad to say. I hope you didn't think I was calling you person with a white savior complex, I don't think you are. But I do want to remind people that just because someone inherited their current standing by a colonizing force doesn't mean only the colonizing force gets credit for the consequences— the culture, the participants, politics etc. Which with you I felt a bit a nudge would make you pause and go, yeah, that is a shared problem with Russian invasion apologists and white savior complex types, and see how thinking Biden or the Democrats can cancel their war suffers from the same chauvinism that we are all powerful, and they are not. We are not the agent deciding what Israel does. Israel is.
But in so far as our imperialists keep getting extra power, conveniently nestled within our oligarchic structures, we go back to your original agreement with Crezth that we're dumb for criticizing the electoral college. The whole of the USA and world system has almost made it, a couple of times, into a categorically better rhythm than our current one, which I don't think is our best potential given our history and our material. Better than many many outcomes, but worse than some foreseeable ones.
In these foreseeable ones, ditch the electoral college, keep localized reps but increase their number, and have the second legislature reflect the nation. Just speed it up we can take it. Democracy doesn't belong to a genetic few, and none of us are actually born of clay in a cave. Although sometimes you wonder. But not actually.
We could even by lottery assign people at random to vote on their phones on almost every issue. Direct democracy by sample. There's a lot of systems that harness what should be much better forms of what we intend, some of them look really alien.
But also we have this world. And to move it for better we need to know why we are here. It's not just past imperialism. It's present things. Bad things are often good things too, so how do we get rid of the bad things and keep the good things, and build on them? "We need a total rewrite!" is the realm of the anxious who will quit when the rewrite comes. Cue Life of Brian faction squabble. But sometimes we get to write a new better part for real.
The entire world can collapse to monarchy. The entire world can collapse to dictatorships. And the entire world can bloom to meaningful democracy.
"correct" bell ringing over and over
