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Cake day: August 17th, 2024

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  • The part of the electorate that benefits from fracking, an even bigger border wall, children in cages at the border, and genocide is not big enough to move the needle. Plus, anyone who looks at those issues and considers them important is much more likely to vote for Trump anyway. Her platform was regressive dog shit, and that’s why people didn’t vote for her (and the genocide of course).

    You can continue with the strategy of blaming the voters, but look where that got you. Just from a completely pragmatic perspective, look where that got you. The past three cycles you keep running candidates no one’s excited about, on essentially republican platforms, with the main selling point being that they’re not Trump (which is a veiled threat, at best). You managed to beat Trump only two out of the three times, and you had a massive pandemic helping you with the one time you did beat him with this strategy.

    Eh, you know what, maybe you’re right. Let’s run on an even more right wing platform four years from now (maybe we can be anti-trans or whatever to attract more moderate republicans, like the 0% we managed to attract this cycle), let’s tell the voters they’re awful people if they vote for the other side, and maybe this time it’ll work





  • If you’re equating the Jewish people with zionism, or conflating being in favor of zionism as somehow being benevolent to the Jewish people as a whole, you are treating the Jewish people as a monolith and are yourself being anti-semitic. Zionism is perfectly compatible with anti-semitism (see for example all those anti-semitic christians who enthusiastically support zionism), and anti-zionism is in itself not anti-semitic (cf Jewish voice for peace).

    So making “zionist” a slur has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with being anti-anti-semitic or not.


  • The same way I don’t think we should capitulate to framing “cracker” as a slur, or to framing “black lives matter” as a racist thing to say, I don’t think we should capitulate to framing things like “from the river to the sea” or “zionist” as antisemitic.

    But, as a thought experiment, let’s indulge in this doublespeak trash. What is a good alternative? So far I’ve got:

    • Israeli colonizers
    • Jewish supremacists
    • genocidal sacks of shit
    • Israeli apartheidists
    • Isreal expansionists
    • Israeli warmongerers
    • people in favor of the genocide and apartheid committed by Israel (in full, every time you need to say zionist)
    • modern day nazis
    • zionazis (technically not zionist!)

    So all of this liberal crybaby nomenclature trash aside, I actually do think “zionist” is in itself a fairly useless term for the Israeli apartheid question (as Norman Finkelstein and Judith Butler do too). While one faction of zionism pursued the nakba and massacres from fairly early on, and while this faction has been quite successful, there are other notions of zionism which do not entail murdering children or colonizing a country. When Netanyahu and Chomsky can both legitimately refer to themselves as zionists, I think it’s clear that zionism is too broad a term to be useful in the current ongoing genocide and the ethnic cleansing that has been going on for the better part of a century.