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Talkin’ about a Revolution

drb.ie

21–30 of 307 posts

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#22
post #19

The world gets both better and worse. it is something that I regularly get voted down for saying here, but IMO the west is unduly pessimist because it had a golden age from winning the cold war until the late 2000s, took an overly optimistic view of the future and the inevitability of progress (remember "the end of history") and cannot cope with things going back to normal. Things get better, sometimes they get worse…

>and cannot cope with things going back to normal.

how do we define "normal" for society?

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#23
post #4

[flagged]

> the genocide contributed to bringing Trump to power Only because folks who refused to vote for Kamala said they could not stand her support of Israel policies :-) Like poor voters in the Midwest, you can always count on a certain electorate, to vote against their own interests and what they care about...

The left refuses to vote for the left because the left isn't crazy and confused enough about jihadis. Checks out.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#25
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did it contribute to bringing trump to power?

It altered voting intent by both Jewish and Islamic groups in ways which were net negative for Harris. The margin of error in voting was less than the number of votes swayed. All of this is out weighed by the "didn't vote" but democrat didn't vote was larger than before. If this issue stimulated a vote boycott it could have affected democrat voters more.

That argument is not really credible to me, saying that democrats did not vote or voted republican because Harris (and Biden before her) were too favorable towards Israel, ignores the fact that it was glaringly obvious that trump would be even more favorable towards Israel.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#27
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the genocide contributed to bringing Trump to power Only because folks who refused to vote for Kamala said they could not stand her support of Israel policies :-) Like poor voters in the Midwest, you can always count on a certain electorate, to vote against their own interests and what they care about...

That's just it though, the democratic and republican parties ran on Israel apartheid maintenance since the end of the second world war. And even in the face of a genocide, the democrats as a national party held the line and refused to consider the crime against humanity unfolding before them. How is electing them supposed to be taken? Should they continue to ignore human rights violations? There was no other way to s…

20% of the population of Israel are Palestinians with full rights. Some were killed 7/10. There's a muslim party in the Knesset.

Remind me again: how many black parties had representation in apartheid South Africa?

You are confused because Israel HAS A apartheid state: the settlements (a small part of Israel in total). But that's not the same as Israel IS A apartheid state.

If you can't separate HAS A from IS A you will fail your Object Oriented Programming 101 course, but no one seems to notice it when talking politics :P

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did it contribute to bringing trump to power?

Some fantasy about how millions of leftists voters either boycotted the election or voted for Trump because of Biden’s position on Gaza. Complete nonsense of course, but it’s a popular conspiracy theory among certain democrats circles. It was also funny to see democrats suddenly realizing that Arab Americans vote republican. They always have and they always will. Just like how Latino Americans, and generally most imm…

The left pretty much falls into the same trap all around the world. Its almost funny to watch when a leftist realises that immigrants are right-leaning. The typical reaction is to fall back to elitism and claim those immigrants must be stupid somehow.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#29
post #18

[flagged]

or the Uighur genocide, or many other mass murders around the world.

the Uighur genocide is the true genocide, it is happening in the real world with tons of pictures and videos as evidence

the Palestinian genocide is a fake genocide, it is propaganda pushed by Chinese and Russian to make Israel and the US looks bad

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#30
Good article. The point about contemporary philosophers not having grand theories is something that comes up frequently in philosophy spaces (i.e., /r/academicphilosophy or https://dailynous.com).

The problem is that the academic system is really not designed to select such individuals, instead optimizing for specialized publications, pedigree, etc. The average philosopher has zero incentive for constructing grand theories and indeed is typically ridiculed for even attempting to do so.

And so instead the best "public intellectuals" the world of philosophy can offer are either obsessively focused on particular issues rather than the field as a whole, (e.g., Peter Singer) or are entirely philosophically-uneducated charlatans who want to sell books and make money, not discover truth (e.g. Sam Harris, talking heads on Twitter, Substack, etc.) that unfortunately get an audience. The closest we get are probably Charles Taylor (big scope, but unfortunately too verbose and abstruse) or Zizek (too niche and far into his own entertainment career.)

I'm not sure what the solution is, but it probably involves a brilliant (and credentialed) philosopher that is also savvy with YouTube and willing to disregard the academic philosophy social milieu.

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