GarbageShootAlt2

joined 2 years ago
[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Aside, again, from the fact that Gaza is being undercounted severely due to strict criteria for marking a civilian death combined with most of the hospitals in Gaza being blown up, yes! the rate of killing matters a great deal to understanding what is going on unless you are taking the hysterical view that Putin is going to kill every Ukrainian and is just dragging his feet a little.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Didn’t formulate it any way, that’s you assuming.

That's me reading English. What I was referring to is a set phrase, but it's not a fossilization, it's still just what the words mean if you're actively putting them together. God, this is such an annoying, pointless argument.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I am obliged to note that genocide does not need to be racial (it can target religion, sexuality, nationality, etc.), but your point stands because none of those apply either. I'll just mark it in the Black Book of Capitalism and be content with that.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

You formulated it as though you were bringing up something new: "you mean the same X who Y" is for introducing something new into the conversation in relation to X, with X here being Jill Stein. If you had just used David Duke as X and "who lead the KKK" as Y, it wouldn't have been an absurd contribution.

Though it would still be a silly one, since people know who David Duke is, it's not some obscure fact. He's the single most recognizable name in connection with the KKK, perhaps along with the long-dead D.W. Griffith (but probably not).

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago (4 children)

starved a great many by just capitalist ideology, but that’s not really genocide…

Genocide doesn't require bloodthirst, it does just fine with sacrifice whole populations for some other goal or accepting those deaths as "collateral". The UN definition supports this.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago (5 children)

What are you doing with cutesy sarcasm and cherrypicked headlines? Just look at the civilian death tolls. The immediately-presented numbers are 36k over 3.5 years to 42k over 1 year, and that's again with massive under-reporting in the latter case.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 5 points 9 months ago

Did you even read what I said? I directly acknowledged that the logical implication of my strategy is that Trump is more likely to win the upcoming election because I'm interested in how subsequent elections will be impacted. The calculus of "Always vote for the nearest viable candidate" is liberal dogma, yes, but it's not the only strategy and I find it to be a bad long-term strategy, because it just incentivizes an accelerating rightward drift from the "left" candidate, leaving you with two right candidates.

Despite needing to re-explain myself, I took what you said at face value and not as just being condescending wank, and now I guess I have egg on my face for my trouble.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 5 points 9 months ago (6 children)

When I said:

and that there is only this one, totalizing crossroad of literal, immediate survival.

This was me saying "It frames things as though losing the election means that all is lost and there won't be future elections."

As I'm pretty sure I explained to you an hour ago in another thread, I think it's an acceptable loss for the Democrats to lose an election to put pressure on them to change or else to establish that they are more loyal to the US project of Israel than they are to trying to win elections or do what voters want or anything like that.

I don't proactively want Trump to win, but I find it totally acceptable since what sets him apart from other Republicans is not that he is especially fascist in the substance of what he is likely to do. It might actually be possible to browbeat me if we had a Tom "throne of Chinese skulls" Cotton or someone as the nominee, he actually represents something that could be totalizing to me, but Trump is just kind of a deranged grifter and Vance is a more even-keel grifter.

So to save us both time, no, I don't think we agree on any points. I wasn't commenting toward that end, I merely wanted to say that the comic is unhelpful.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 0 points 9 months ago (8 children)

There’s a genocide roughly 10x as large going on in Ukraine

Civilian deaths in Ukraine over the last ~3.5 years are still smaller than the substantially underestimated civilian death toll in Gaza after 1 year (which came from a very stringent set of definitions that basically can't be executed on anymore because of Israel bombing the hospitals).

There's no way you could get to this conclusion except some hysterical idea about Putin wanting to put all the Ukrainians in camps as though that's what he did with Crimea.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

I’m confused how you believe that Israel’s rabid ethnic cleansing campaign is a liberal democrat policy,

This is the form imperialism typically takes, an imperial "core" where things are relatively comfortable and humane and a "periphery" where things are extremely brutal. It's more obvious when there's a war the core has more direct involvement in, like Obama siccing the Air Force on Yemen in conjunction with the Saudis, but this too is a case of it.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 10 points 9 months ago (22 children)

This is question-begging a number of critical elements, e.g. that the "rafts" cannot be influenced by "passenger" input, and that there is only this one, totalizing crossroad of literal, immediate survival.

We can do it too:

You're in a runaway train accelerating toward a cliff and the break only really stops acceleration, it doesn't decelerate. You can sit in the engine room and hold down the break, and you'll live longer, but you aren't changing the fundamental dynamic of the situation, which ends in your eventual death. Conversely, you can jump off the train, surely injuring yourself, possibly crippling yourself, maybe even killing yourself, but it's the only potential way to change the dynamic of being doomed to fall off the cliff.

Does this prove anything? No, it's just a model of how some people think of the problem, not an argument. It would be really obnoxious and disingenuous to present it as an argument.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 11 points 9 months ago (5 children)

You were just so excited to use this talking point that you couldn't be bothered to note that he was responding to it in the very comment you used it on.

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