I’m speechless

On a related note, it’s amusing how there’s a bit of a civil war they’re having over blaming Brandon for enabling Israel’s genocide, and blaming him for “funding” Hamas and not helping them enough. Going by the comments.

  • TupamarosShakur [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    42
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    It’s been very funny actually watching the right try to decide if they’re pro-Palestine or pro-Israel. I look at my (former) friend’s Twitter sometimes and he’ll share pro-Palestine and pro-Israel memes pretty equally. It’s really always been like this, /pol/ used to have struggle sessions over whether to be pro-Palestine due to antisemitism or pro-Israel due to hating Muslims.

    I think there’s something else going on though which is the deepening of the dem/gop divide based on financial/petit bourgeoisie class divisions. The gop is not so “pro-Palestine” as they are anti-globalization. They try to pass this position off as an antiwar or anti imperialist position, and they’ll make gestures towards being pro-Palestine, because they know such positions will win them political points and undermine the dems antiwar reputation, and also maybe win over a few inexperienced leftists, but then they’ll turn around and talk about going to war with China, bombing Iran or invading Mexico. So the anti-globalization thing is more a reaction to these wealthy financial elites profiting off global exploitation while they undergo a process of proletarianization at home partially due to the financial elite’s globalization projects. Ukraine and israel are in the financial elite’s interests, to keep open and expand these markets and markets in those regions. It is not in the national/petit bourgeoisie’s interest as such markets compete with them, and they’d much rather more isolationism and protectionism.

    Maybe someone can explain better than me. But that’s sort of the materialist explanation. But of course you also have contrarian brainworms and, I’m convinced, some former leftists and bush/Obama era libertarians who went hard right due to stupid stuff like Covid lockdowns, pronouns, and the trans panic who still retain some former positions like being pro-Palestine (or, at least, anti-flattening a hospital, maybe they’re two-state solution types or something)

    • combat_brandonism [they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Good take. I think you also can’t underestimate the evangelical love for Isn’trael as a vehicle for Armageddon either. Even though the material motivation (for the petty boug) for the stance may have passed, it’s got its own momentum.

      There might even be an angle about proletarianization breeding doomsday cults/beliefs which have fueled that Israel support but I’m not smart enough to fully connect that dot.

      • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        21
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        As a former evangelical, I want to add that I don’t think (and this is all anecdotal supposition) the motivation to bring about Armageddon is really the driving motivator outside of some Pentecostal circles.

        IMO the bigger driver is that - as weird as this sounds - the existence of Israel somehow in their minds validates the historicity of the Old Testament. Israel belongs to the Jews because God says so and they conquered it. So the present existence of Israel is sort of “proof” of all these historical claims.

        Biblical inerrancy (and thus, the idea that the Old Testament is real history) is suuuuper important to evangelicals. It’s a core tenet, and it’s why so many of them cling to Young Earth Creationism and a literal flood, despite those things being as likely as a flat earth.

        Oh and a lot of it is just your standard racism against brown people. Racism is just so pervasive in the evangelical church it’s hard to separate that out as an independent factor.

        • pillow [she/her]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          my read is just it’s mostly a sense of ecumenism cause they read some of the same scripture and share “judeo-christian values” etc

      • totally. that’s where i am at. trying to make the narrative of “look, this is a western european political project to maintain a settler-colonial presence in the middle east. we’re backing one outsider ethnic group and letting it run wild on the indigenous peoples, in an effort to prevent any sort of pan-regional multi-ethnic project from emerging and challenging the western hegemony. the religious conflict is the tactic, the beachhead is the strategy” is way too complicated and looks morally repugnant. so instead, it’s been decades of fomenting the most unhinged religious zealotry among evangelicals. that is always america’s move: find the religious wackos, wind them up, and set them loose. because they will heel turn against any socialist/communist formation at the blink of an eye.

        so after 50 years of arming some religious nuts and winding up others, the boiler is full of fuel and the pressure release valve has snapped off. the stage is set for both political parties to tear themselves apart over this shit. in the lead up to the iraq war, the pressure against anti-war protests and to deplatform them was near universal. empire didn’t need threats and laws from lawmakers to be silenced. this one, it’s like this constant stream of explicit threats (like the BDS bans, the slander against DSA) and obvious lies (hamas rocketed their own hospital, trust us) from the mouths of newsreaders.

        like they are pulling all the levers to manufacture consent but struggling to get traction, meanwhile the right-wingers can’t figure out if they’re supposed to be pro-israel, anti-semites, or wait until JFK jr. reappears and tells them what to do.

    • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      None of them are pro-palestine. Some of them are anti-israel because they hate jews and think israel represents jews, but they would rather everyone in palestine be massacred than a pluralist, equal, democratic single state with full rights and political representation for palestinians.

    • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Literally had my professor in a graduate program of political economy bring up Animal Farm as an example of important theoretical critique of communism. I had to avoid laughing because I need a letter of rec from this idiot someday.

      • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I think that the most interesting part of Animal Farm, is while it doesn’t portray communism or communist revolutions very accurately, it does portray liberal revolutions (particularly the American one) incredibly accurately. Everyone is equal under the law, except for us, who don’t have to actually pay our debts to anybody else, particularly the men who did the fighting for us and now we are buying up their cheap land, literally eating the livelihoods of the others.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      26
      ·
      1 year ago

      None of these people are isolationists. Their idea of America first is preemptively nuking the Middle East, Latin America, and China, then enslaving whoever survives to mine resources for them.

      • captcha [any]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        There absolutely are isolationists in the US. They have a long tradition that was far more pronounced before WWII. Rhetorically they dont support getting involved in any war because that only benefits liberal imperialists. But in practice the liberal imperialists just need to fabricate some incident and then they start foaming and demanding we turn some country into glass. A decade later they figure out they were lied to again and the cycle repeats itself.

    • CTHlurker [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      Once again being reminded of the weirdos who argued that America shouldn’t colonize the Philippines because it would make it easier for the Filipinos to move to America. Imagine being so right wing that you somehow come out as a staunch anti-imperialist.

      • captcha [any]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Simple, be a petit-bourgeoisie nationalist who doesn’t have a way to profit off of war.

        War? What is it good for? Not my small business.

        • CTHlurker [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          I’m pretty sure that the guys I’m thinking of were mostly Californians who lived in the area around San Francisco and helped found Stanford, and who were concerned that the Filiponos would move there if formal colonization occured.

  • GarfieldYaoi [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    1 year ago

    I can’t believe I’m defending the NYT, but the NYT could be writing an article about how some guy coughed, and normies will flood them screaming “IT’S NOT TRUE UNLESS FOX N00Z SEZ SO!”

    The hive mind is hilarious and I can’t believe they haven’t figured out that Fox and the internet ARE the mainstream media.

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      well the problem with the article is they keep editing the title to erase Israeli complicity. The right seething about this in the wrong direction is simply because they’re reactionary. I wouldn’t say you’re defending NYT so much as recognizing the reactionaries are ridiculous.

  • underwire212@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    What are they even complaining about? That they used the same image for 3 different articles?

      • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        31
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Except the facts didn’t change, the IOF just refused to claim responsibility, and are now scrambling to assign blame elsewhere in order to create FUD, which is pretty typical wartime propoganda, especially if they are planning to mount a ground offensive soon. We all fight over who bombed the hospital while ignoring the ground offensive that is imminent.

        Regardless, this is just one incredibly egregious war crime in a sea of war crimes this week by the IOF, so it’s very funny to watch the hullabaloo around them attempting to pin this on the IJF. Ultimately, the original claim of the NYT headlines is still completely accurate, but the idea that headlines are altered to obfuscate the truth is somehow ‘leftist’ or ‘communist’ is typical reactionary boomer brain in action, which hasn’t read a real book since high school forty years ago.

      • combat_brandonism [they/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        1 year ago

        lmao when you’re so high on liberalism you don’t recognize passive voice in headlines when the edits are right in front of you defend increasingly passive voice headlines that exhonerate the oppressor as being “more accurate”

        this has been critiqued for years, I’d thought libs like you died out entirely after 2020

        you have until this countdown ends to do some self-crit and delete your comment countdown