“Trump is gearing up for a genocide,” isn’t a lie, though. It might be wrong, but wrong isn’t the same thing as “dishonest.”
Also, cite for where Republicans have been harmed in anyway whatsoever by constantly lying their ass off?
I think some amount of panic is called for because we aren’t fighting back much, that I can see.
PBS is gone. 500 Million for Vaccine Research is gone. USAID is stopped (I think, it’s hard to keep up), They are housing human beings in a place they laughingly call Alligator Alcatraz, millions of people have lost health care and food assistance. I could go on, but you all know all this and probably better than I do.
If we don’t start feeling panic, it will be too late to try to stop it.
So I think arguing that we don’t know when the next shoe will drop, or even what kind of shoe it will be, so we better get started pretty damn soon trying in earnest to turn this around before it really is too late.
USAID is gone, the projects ended and food aid destroyed rather than distributed. USAID was a direct link to the Marshal plan and represented the creation of the post WWII world. Its destruction was the final act in the end of America’s soft power influence. But let’s not get hysterical.
…this literally happened to me today!
I have a neighbour who lives down the street. She’s concerned about what Netanyahu’s government is doing to the people in Gaza because she believes the government is setting up extermination camps where they will kill all the people who they’ve got trapped in a tiny strip of land. So she wants to fight these extermination camps.
Then the government comes along and produces credible proof that they do not have any extermination camps. “We are the most moral army in the world!” they say. Netanyahu comes on TV and says “if we were committing a genocide, we are doing a very bad job at this.”
He produces evidence they are providing millions of tonnes of food. So they can’t be starving anyone. And when challenged about how Rafah has been flattened, he says “that wasn’t us. It was Hamas. They booby-trapped the entire city. It wasn’t our bulldozers. It wasn’t us. It was them.”
Here is video of him saying it, so it must be true.
Here is the problem with your argument.
It assumes the neighbour’s fight was “imaginary.”
And it assumes the credible evidence provided by the government would stand under scrutiny and isn’t just propaganda.
So you want the neighbour instead to pick their battles. “What is happening in Gaza isn’t genocide. It will all be over if Hamas releases the hostages.”
This is liberal centrism in a fucking nutshell. It what allowed the genocide to happen in the first place. Because this is what happened over a year ago, while people were warning that this was going to happen. And now it’s in the final stages, it’s too late to stop it. Our best chance to end the genocide was while Biden was President. But people like me were accused of “over-the-top anti-Biden hysteria.” They assumed my fight was “imaginary.” And believed everything said by the Biden administration.
It’s the same thing that’s happening with trans rights. The Democrats are capitulating over sports and prisons and bathrooms. They think it’s more important “not to take the bait” than it is to actually fight for human rights. They believe the “credible” evidence that trans women have an advantage over cis women. So why fight an imaginary fight?
But that leads to the nightmare situation in the UK, where the “left-wing” Labour Party is leading the fight against the “evil trans agenda.” It’s near impossible now for trans kids to access trans healthcare. It lead to an explosion of suicides. They are openly trying to restrict trans care for adults. A controversial ruling by the UK Supreme Court had led to poorly implemented attempts at bathroom bans. Many sports have implemented trans women bans in women’s sports.
In the UK it isn’t going to stop here. It will keep on going until many trans people either are forced to detransition, they go into hiding, or they decide to take their own lives.
And when we talk about trans genocide: this is what we mean. It doesn’t mean rounding trans people up and exterminating them. (Although it doesn’t exclude this) It means forced detransitioning. It means making it unacceptable and unsafe to be out in public.
You really need to just start minding your own fucking business. Again, it’s telling that this analogy is about a neighbour. You sound like an overwrought leader of a HOA, and the neighbour isn’t quite breaking the rules, but doing just enough to piss you off, so you started this thread to get all passive-aggressive about it.
Once again: the problem isn’t the neighbour who occasionally says something mildly or even hysterically over the top.
Gaslighting.
You are advocating for gaslighting.
The Democrats are masters at gaslighting. People still believe that “Biden was a force for restraint.” It’s why so many Americans supported the genocide until Trump was in charge.
To be fair, he probably chose a neighbor in the analogy because I brought up things happening to my neighbors.
If one of my neighbors is scared about genocide because people around her are being kidnapped by masked goons, I can’t begin to imagine that scolding her for jumping to the conclusion it may be a genocide would help her be inspired to fight. At all.
Calming her panic probably would, but no one’s panic ever got calmed by being dismissed as hysteria. (Has it? Does anyone have a real world example of that ever happening?)
ETA: If we’re going to endlessly parse terms like ‘genocide’, perhaps we should do the same for terms like ‘hysteria’, which have insulting connotations.
There was also the Egyption and Greek belief that hysteria was caused by a, “wandering uterus.” I don’t know about the other women here, but my uterus wandering around in a huff would freak me out. So, I agree strongly with @Frilly_Heck. “Hysteria’“ is insulting for many reasons. Telling someone they are being,”hysterical, will likely shut down the conversation.
No, that’s the literal definition of genocide. When you start using the word genocide to describe lesser crimes, you’re trivializing mass murder.
is, by no definition, the definition of genocide.
…no it fucking isn’t. And if you got your head out of the fucking sand for just a fucking minute you would know that. This has been debated over and over again this last year.
Good GOD you are so fucking ignorant.
Genocide is defined by Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide.
By your definition, the Bosnian genocide wasn’t a genocide because it didn’t involve the planned killing of millions of people. That isn’t how it works.
And this is exactly the argument used to pretend that what is happening in Gaza right now isn’t genocide. All it is is an excuse for genocide denial.
No; the point of insisting that the only definition of genocide is “openly kill millions of people in camps”, is to justify genocide. The first thing that happens whenever genocide comes up, is people pop out if the woodwork insisting that the genocide in question “doesn’t count” because of some carefully-crafted definition that excludes that specific example.
So the Holodomor doesn’t count as genocide, the mass deaths of the Great Leap Forward don’t count, the extermination of the Native Americans doesn’t count, and now it’s the purge of non-whites from the US that don’t count.
When you say things like this, you’re trivializing genocide and mass murder.
He thinks we’re being hysterical because he doesn’t know what words mean.
I have to concur with Banquet Bear. If you think that’s the only definition of genocide, then no wonder you’re upset.
And, yes, I’m in part making this post in case you write off BB or DerTrihs as not knowing what they’re talking about.
I’ve yet to see anyone use hysteria or hysterical in a way that wasn’t about trying to minimize other people’s arguments.
It seems like, if he wanted to argue against these statements being accurate, or to discuss strategy, it would have made more sense to make a thread in Politics, not one that attacks people who clearly do not agree with him.
And hysterical is a word usually used by people who don’t have a strong understanding of the issue.
…I do want to apologise to Little_Nemo.
I’m more frustrated not with you, individually, but with the millions of people that have said things just like you, that have helped usher in the darkest timeline we are living in.
Because you look at how the people that have been yelling the loudest over the last decade have been treated.
“Abolish Ice.”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/07/02/the_problem_with_abolish_ice.html
Defund the police.
Trans bathroom policies:
On not using the word “genocide”
The people that have been yelling the loudest, trying to sound alarm bells at every opportunity, have been shouted down, laughed at, belittled, and ignored.
You are being “over the top” people say. “Hysterical.”
And even now, while it seems like nearly every Western government is colluding to not only fund and support the genocide in Gaza, they are working together to further restrict the internet, create a surveillance state, crush dissent, attack the homeless, demonize brown and black people, and make as much money as they can, people just can’t resist kicking down.
I have no idea if any of the things that prompted the OP are going to happen or not. But Donald Trump managed to get himself elected twice. If that isn’t the surest sign that anything can happen, I don’t know what is.
I lashed out at you because that post represents :: waves hands :: ALL of this. The only realistic chance of defeating Trump and holding MAGA at bay not only in America, but around the world, was for people to take the threat seriously.
And even now: you still can’t do that.
Hysterical is also a word used by people who are dealing with somebody who is hysterical.
Let’s go back to the fundamentals here. Reread the OP.
Let me be clear on this point; I am not defending Donald Trump. He is both evil and stupid. He is a terrible human being and he is the worst President this country has ever had. He, along with the Republican party, are trying to destroy democracy. He has committed numerous serious crimes and should be in prison.
Hopefully that establishes my bona fides. I’m in full agreement with everyone who thinks Trump and the Republicans need to be stopped. We’re not arguing about the goal. We’re arguing over the tactics.
Some people seem to feel that I’m helping Trump by not being fervid enough in my opposition. But I feel the opposite; I feel that there are people who sincerely oppose Trump but are unknowingly assisting him by being too fervid in their opposition.
This isn’t a battle to show your fellow believers that you’re one of them and impress them with how much you support the cause. The important battle here is to convince people who aren’t believers that they should join the cause.
And I feel that screaming in people’s faces about how the Republicans are going to commit genocide and restore slavery and start nuclear wars is not the way to win them over. I worry that what you’re doing is going to people who have concerns about what Trump and the Republicans are doing and then convincing them that for all their faults, at least Trump and the Republicans aren’t the crazy ones.
In other words, you feel that we’re making slippery slope arguments, which, since they are demostrably currently untrue and in many cases unlikely, are counterproductive.
I don’t know. The fact that genocide (by any reasonable definition, like the one linked by @Banquet_Bear) has already begun seems to me to require some shouting. The Bear & I disagree over Biden / Gaze, but they are absolutely correct that people called the Gaza genocide in plenty of time to prevent it. Those shouting “genocide!” were dismissed as hysterical, and what do you know? Now we have mass starvation and plans of territorial occupation.
Maybe, instead of worrying that we’re too hysterical, you should consider that the hysteria is actually pitched quite correctly for the situation on the ground now.
Someone in this thread is engaging in excessive hyperbole that fundamentally undermines their position, but it’s not who you seem to think it is.
This whole line of argument feels less like it’s about how to effectively fight the regime, and more about pet peeves.
I have been fighting this battle for a while, and I’ve tried many different tactics. The best one, IMO, is to find the people who want to fight, but feel like they can’t for some reason, and to help them deal with that reason. Most of us are limited not by our values, but by not knowing how to effectively put them into practice.