Israel Hamas War, West Bank | Israel accuses Hamas of violating Cease Fire

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Paine said:
The Democrats always seem to blame the left for their own failures as well. Guess it’s par for the course.

You’re literally doing it now by blaming powerless college protestors for the Democratic Party’s massive failure in 2024. In 2016, it was Jill Stein. In 2000 it was Nader.

Anyways, nowhere in my posts do I blame “the public” for holding the left down. Nice straw man though. In fact, I’ve been one of the only posters here to not blame the public for Trump’s victory. To say that I blame everyone but the left for the left’s failures is just a complete fabrication that’s divorced from anything approaching my politics, which you never actually engage with.
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The left has a tradition, as you show very well, of abandoning the Democratic Party and then wondering whey the Democratic Party doesn't take it seriously as a partner.

You don't blame the public for holding the left down, but I never said you did. What you misinterpreted is the role the public plays in not supporting the left. The left doesn't gain any traction in American politics because it doesn't put forth any plans that appeal to the public on a significant scale. But instead of realizing that is the issue, the left just keeps blaming moderate Dems for the failures of the left.
 
Paine said:
You say that I show very well the tradition of leftists abandoning the Democratic Party without knowing anything about me. That’s telling. You’re mapping on your feelings about other leftists to me without critically engaging with my positions.

Here’s exactly what you said: “In your world, the left is NC State and the public is John Swofford, forever holding them down from their just rewards.”

How am I misinterpreting this statement? It pretty clearly shows that you think I blame the public for holding the left down. Just like State fans blame Swofford for holding them down. Don’t run away from your statement now.

To say that the left gains no traction because they don’t present plans that appeal to Americans is a gross oversimplification of American political history that isn’t even worth responding to. You’re smart enough to know that isn’t true.
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You show the tradition in the very post I quoted...Nader in 2000, Stein in 2016, non-support in 2024. You laid out the tradition very well and I didn't need to add anything to it because you covered it well.

I wasn't being literal in that statement about State/Swofford and I know you didn't specifically blame the public. But every time these discussions come up there's always complaints from you that the left isn't given a real chance in American politics as if it is some kind of conspiracy against you. The reality is that the left makes claims that the public simply rejects. The only "conspiracy" here is that the ideas the left generates just don't motivate the public to support them at the ballot box.
 
Paine said:
The Democrats always seem to blame the left for their own failures as well. Guess it’s par for the course.

You’re literally doing it now by blaming powerless college protestors for the Democratic Party’s massive failure in 2024. In 2016, it was Jill Stein. In 2000 it was Nader.

Anyways, nowhere in my posts do I blame “the public” for holding the left down. Nice straw man though. In fact, I’ve been one of the only posters here to not blame the public for Trump’s victory. To say that I blame everyone but the left for the left’s failures is just a complete fabrication that’s divorced from anything approaching my politics, which you never actually engage with.
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In fairness, Nader was responsible in 2000. He pulled a big third party share by lying, and that clearly cost Gore the election.

The others I am a little bit less firmly convinced about.
 
RaiGuy said:
While Trump is a million times worse, I wouldn’t say that Biden did much in the best interest of Palestinians. In his last interview, he basically stated that Netanyahu was telling him they were basically planning to commit a genocide (comparing it to what the US did with the nuclear bombs) and Biden was fine with it. Again, I voted for Harris and know that Trump is basically Satan, but that doesn’t mean that Biden was good for Palestinians in this situation. He was just not as bad as Trump.
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He did put sanctions on the settlers. If Kamala had won that might have been expanded. Trump removed them and Israel is running wild.

Biden's problem was politics of Iraq War redux. The Republicans just lied that Saddam = Al Q, and the Dems who told the truth were ousted as unpatriotic, including the truly pathetic Saxby Chambliss campaign. And Hamas really were terrorists. The politics were impossible, because too many Americans just hate Islam and Arabs. Period.

I don't know exactly what Biden thought or what he would have done if unconstrained by politics. But he did burn his relationship with Bibi over this, and pressed hard to get the slaughter to be at least contained. The American contribution was overstated anyway. To my knowledge, the bombs were just bombs. Israel could have and would have gotten them elsewhere.
 
Any chance that Trump’s comment will detail the peace plan?

Why would Palestine continue releasing POWs and hostages if there is a credible threat that they will be wiped out after the prisoner/hostage exchanges are completed?
 
Paine said:
The left isn’t often given a real chance in American politics but not because of any kind of conspiracy against the left. I’ve never claimed that there is a conspiracy against the left, though other leftists certainly have claimed that. Again, please just engage with what I’m saying rather than what you think I’m saying or what other leftists have said.

My thoughts about why the left doesn’t gain traction in America are much more structural than that. Besides, there have been times in American history when the left has gained traction. It’s no coincidence that the left was it its strongest in this country when labor was at its strongest.

Leftist ideas heavily influenced the New Deal. Last time I checked, the programs that are still around from that era are pretty damn popular with the American public.

It’s just not as simple as the left making claims and then the public rejecting them. That’s not how politics in this country works. That’s not really how politics works anywhere.

Look at opinion polls of issues that would be considered “left” issues. A ton of them garner a majority of public support. It’s not a conspiracy to say that operating within the current political and economic structure of the United States puts the left at a disadvantage. I’m sure you would acknowledge that it puts the Democratic Party at a disadvantage. That is magnified x100 for people left of the Democratic mainstream.

To simplify politics to the point of accepting or rejecting an entire program or worldview based on individual election results (especially in an electoral system as skewed as ours) is asinine. Is the entire platform of the Democratic Party now rejected by the American public since Harris lost?

The wider point, going back to the origin of this discussion, is that the left-wing in the United States is utterly broken and disorganized. Not as much as it was in its nadir, but it is not anywhere close to an effective political force. Bernie was the closest thing to hammering out some kind of consistent left program, but we all know of his failures. If there was a real left force in this country, we wouldn’t be talking about college protestors as representative of the left.
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I would say that American voters have rejected the ideals and goals of the Democratic Party. If the party can lose 2 of 3 elections against someone as terrible as Trump, then it’s clear that the voters don’t want what Dems are offering. I’m not sure where the party goes from here and I’m not sure how the party even figures it out.

As to the failures of the left to coalesce as a real group/movement, why do you think that is? And what do you think would change that failure?
 
SnoopRob said:
I would say that American voters have rejected the ideals and goals of the Democratic Party. If the party can lose 2 of 3 elections against someone as terrible as Trump, then it’s clear that the voters don’t want what Dems are offering. I’m not sure where the party goes from here and I’m not sure how the party even figures it out.
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Trump will make the Democrats win again. He's been president a week and he's thrown everything into chaos. In two months, his approval rating is going to be in the toilet, far deeper than anyone's ever been. Republicans are going to have to distance themselves from him. The pardons will blow up in his face. The trade wars are going to be extremely unpopular. We're going to slide into a fairly deep recession, I think, once the fallout from the retaliatory sanctions take hold.

This is looking a lot like 2004. Bush came in again, badly overreached, created chaos and the Dems cleaned up in 2006 and then swept through in 2008. It just so happens we have a rising star who even talks like Barack.
 
superrific said:
Trump will make the Democrats win again. He's been president a week and he's thrown everything into chaos. In two months, his approval rating is going to be in the toilet, far deeper than anyone's ever been. Republicans are going to have to distance themselves from him. The pardons will blow up in his face. The trade wars are going to be extremely unpopular. We're going to slide into a fairly deep recession, I think, once the fallout from the retaliatory sanctions take hold.

This is looking a lot like 2004. Bush came in again, badly overreached, created chaos and the Dems cleaned up in 2006 and then swept through in 2008. It just so happens we have a rising star who even talks like Barack.
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To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Dems will never win another election, the electorate is far too fickle for either party to dominate national elections like that.

But it's clear to me that even slightly left-of-center politics isn't enough to motivate folks to go to the polls for Dems in numbers sufficient to win. It seems to me we're in an age where Pubs are leading the national discussion and Dems essentially get voted into office occasionally to clean up the messes Pubs make so that voters can then put Pubs back into office to fuck everything up again.

At some point, the government can't continue in a "barely keep functioning" manner and needs to address the major issues we're facing. Unless the Dems can do something significant to gain control of the government again, it looks like those solutions will be largely Republican determined.
 
SnoopRob said:
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Dems will never win another election, the electorate is far too fickle for either party to dominate national elections like that.

But it's clear to me that even slightly left-of-center politics isn't enough to motivate folks to go to the polls for Dems in numbers sufficient to win. It seems to me we're in an age where Pubs are leading the national discussion and Dems essentially get voted into office occasionally to clean up the messes Pubs make so that voters can then put Pubs back into office to fuck everything up again.

At some point, the government can't continue in a "barely keep functioning" manner and needs to address the major issues we're facing. Unless the Dems can do something significant to gain control of the government again, it looks like those solutions will be largely Republican determined.
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How do you figure?

Since 92 we have:
Dem
Dem
Rep
Rep
Dem
Dem
Rep
Dem
Rep

That looks like a country that is divided 45/45/10 and just rotates on a very regular basis. Doesn’t look like either party has any better grasp on the electorate than the other.
 
SnoopRob said:
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Dems will never win another election, the electorate is far too fickle for either party to dominate national elections like that.

But it's clear to me that even slightly left-of-center politics isn't enough to motivate folks to go to the polls for Dems in numbers sufficient to win. It seems to me we're in an age where Pubs are leading the national discussion and Dems essentially get voted into office occasionally to clean up the messes Pubs make so that voters can then put Pubs back into office to fuck everything up again.

At some point, the government can't continue in a "barely keep functioning" manner and needs to address the major issues we're facing. Unless the Dems can do something significant to gain control of the government again, it looks like those solutions will be largely Republican determined.
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This is very much where I am at as well. The current system isn’t sustainable.
 
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