#aka in countries where most of the population are poc and/or muslim

[likedbyuarmyhope]

why do ppl only express disappointment that bts r “supporting problematic countries” when the country in question is in the middle east

[gaybabeyjailbreak]

This is certainly such a self-serving cope of you specifically wanting to reason you not being a bad person for not doing more than vote.

You are complicit in allowing a fascist regime commit genocide overseas and inside the country without even a passing mention, since you actively refuse to be more politically active than go to a voting booth and handing it to the person who asked.

In that sense you're correct, you're doing nothing while pretending to have the moral high ground and that's pathetic.

There's a disconnect where you say america is so deeply tied to Israel, and no candidate will be as critical as you want them to be, and then proclaim Kamala is somehow the better option.

1. You are actively living in a democracy where both of your options are colonial fascists. Neither of them is a lesser evil or a better option.

2. You cannot mitigate damage by electing a colonial fascist, it's outright insulting if you think someone willing to let tens of thousands of muslims die will somehow be nice and considerate to you lot when you ask nicely, it's also very white.

3. Specifically Kamala will not be damage mitigation to anything. The administration handed Israel 20 billion dollars worth of genocide equipment just last week, and you think a promise to a ceasefire is going to work out. With a settler state committing acts of genocide and inhumane torture, one that has just received resources to continue the genocide.

Well I guess it certainly is damage mitigation if by the time she'll efficiently do anything about it Gaza will be dust and the Palestinian population will be fully dead and displaced. Also ceasefire won't fucking help, ceasefire will not remove the israeli settlers, the israeli settlements, and the purposefully vile and heinous treatment of the populace, but i guess it would make them stop killing for like 5 days. What a win. For collonial violence, specifically.

At this point Trump would be better for Palestine because he at least wouldn't be lying about wanting Israel to finish the job, and wouldn't have sent so much money there way since his admin needs to embezzle it so much.

4. And you think the incredibly cop friendly top cop Kamala will be easier to organise under? You're telling me you, who doesn't organise under Biden think it's going to be easier to organise under someone who supports The US law enforcement this heavily, thinks it will be easier? Putting aside the fact that that is delusional, the people who actively do organize the most, aka PoC will not have an easier time standing against a system that actively kills them as is today and you think it will be easier.

Cool, really shows me the trustworthy expertise you portray that definitely isn't just myopic complacent racism.

The question didn't change or became anything new. It always was whether or not you were willing to realize what system you live in, and what you do about it. And you opted to be blind to it, and upkeep its principles and values without question.

If you knew what you're dealing with and still realized you still want to work within the system, you would be doing the actual damage mitigation, joining and contributing with Campaigning groups grilling the democratic party into committing to their word and holding them accountable for the absolute shit they commit now. Act like your vote has the value you proclaim it has in the least.

Even then, while better, is still playing into the ruleset of a fascist government, the reality being that your governing body who asks you to vote, gives you a selection of a fascist and a fascist liar, and it's simply by the notion of your privilege that the system you have doesn't dissuade your comfort.

If you want to change anything, change that first.

It’s wild the number of posts I come across where people act like voting for or supporting Harris and Walz in the election is tantamount to implicitly supporting genocide. You know what actually helps genocide? Doing nothing while pretending you have the moral high ground. America is deeply tied to Israel and there will be no candidate who is as critical of their actions as we want them to be. We as private citizens do not have the power to make the USA suddenly cease all activity with Israel and demand an uncompromising ceasefire deal. Instead, we have to get our hands dirty and decide what path forward will mitigate as much harm as possible. You have one presidential candidate saying Israel needs to finish the job and another saying that we can’t ignore the tragedies in Gaza while vocally supporting a temporary ceasefire. These are your two picks. Thinking any third party candidate has a shot when none have any wide-reaching name recognition less than 100 days before the election is a fever dream.

The question then becomes, are you willing to say you voted “correctly” by voting for someone who has no shot of winning but is most closely aligned to you? Or are you going to vote for who will do the least harm? The idea that voting for a president involves liking them is a fairy tale. The establishment will always be the enemy of civil rights and safety. You’re voting for which opponent you want in office. The writing is on the wall about which candidate will be less of an uphill battle to fight against, and sidestepping the responsibility of making that decision by throwing away a vote isn’t moral or intellectually groundbreaking - it’s cowardly.

[qqueenofhades]

So I just read an op-ed in the NYT entitled “Repeal the Second Amendment”, and it begins with the sentence, I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.

The article takes a classically liberal tack of arguing with statistics (the numbers of people guns have killed in America, as if anyone doesn’t know) and admits it would be difficult to accomplish. It presents a problem that anyone with eyes and a drop of common sense can see, but doesn’t do anything to address or understand the actual cause at the root of the belief in unlimited gun ownership. Which is, pure and simple, racism, white privilege and White Threat, in response to the changing socio-political environment of America and calls for multiculturalism. The same people who fetishize the Founding Fathers and “Don’t Tread on Me” and right-wing libertarianism and the Second Amendment are attached to their guns because they represent the hypothetical (and often actual) possibility of “defending” themselves against the person-of-color Other. It is their ability to remove this non-white entity from the body politic without recourse to the deeply mistrusted or conspiracy-theory version of the government they believe exists (and yet somehow manages to encompass staunch support for unpunished cop killings and the like). It is personal license to commit (racist) violence at will, whether theoretical or actual, or to feel “safe” from imagined (black/POC) threat.

This is not saying that every single gun owner is racist. This is not saying that every gun owner identifies as right-wing conservative. This is, however, saying that American gun culture and American racism and white privilege intersect toxically and are impossible to extricate from one another, and that the two systems support and perpetuate the other. The Charlottesville Nazis were the ones marching with automatic weapons for a reason, and right-wing boasts that “their side has all the guns” aren’t coincidental. Nobody needs a fully automatic assault rifle to defend their house. A handgun, maybe, sure, if you live in a bad neighborhood and know how to use it. But the ongoing legality of military-grade weapons that have no conceivable self-defense or hunting purpose is not an aberration or an accident. It is tied directly to racism, and American racism in particular.

We’ve all already observed the white privilege that led to Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas killer, immediately being called a “lone wolf” rather than a terrorist, and that his massive purchases of arms and ammunition didn’t raise any red flags, whereas it was merely accepted that a white male had a legitimate “right” to possess these weapons and “nobody could have envisioned” him actually using them. If he had been a Muslim or a black man, good lord, that alone would have served as “justification” for his actions and all kinds of new racist legislation would be enjoying present public support. But because he was a white man, there is a search for “another motive” or something else beyond his identity explaining it, when statistically, white male domestic terrorists are the most deadly and do the most damage (as well as overwhelmingly being responsible for mass shootings.) We claim to be simply helpless to prevent anything like this from happening again, and instead somehow accept that any public space, any time, can become the scene of mass carnage and destruction, rather than unseat the paradigm on which this mindset is, at its heart, based.

It’s also the case that it was called the “worst mass shooting” in American history, when -- as has also been pointed out -- any of the Native American massacres in the nineteenth century were far, far worse, such as Wounded Knee, where 300 Indians (200 of whom were women and children) were shot in December 1890. The United States has always had a gun problem, and it has always had a racism problem. These two things go together.

This is the real reason America cannot enact meaningful gun reform, despite an overwhelming majority of voters in both parties supporting common-sense restrictions. It’s not theoretical vast amounts of NRA cash (as the op-ed does correctly point out, it’s not that much in the grand scheme of things). It’s not a lack of desire for public change, and it’s certainly not not enough tragedies and indiscriminate killings to justify the need. It’s because attempting to dismantle American gun culture would require directly attempting to dismantle American racism and the sense of white America that it “needs its guns” to defend against the ongoing multi-cultural threat. The country is about to celebrate Christopher Columbus Day, aka the man responsible for wholesale genocide of the West Indies and more deaths (at least seven million) than of Jews (six million) during the Holocaust, as well as the ongoing centuries of colonization and extermination of native populations by the Western world. Politicians struggle with the simple and basic (and one would think, self-evident) premise of repudiating Nazism. The sitting president calls them “very fine people.”

This is not an accident, and these things do not exist independent of each other. We cannot have gun reform because white privilege will react to prevent it, just as white privilege and gun culture interact to support and reinforce each other. Until we get anywhere in addressing that (sidenote: I’ve been working my way through Stamped from the Beginning, Dr. Ibram Kendi’s book, the last few nights, and.... yeah), nothing is going to change.