Anonymous #1 1d

Solid read for the most part, it’s a Canadian/american war correspondent/ journalist who grew up in Egypt giving his take on the Israeli genocide. That and just generally the experience of growing up brown in the west and what it means for his identify and others like him to be living in the west now, especially given the recent failures of American democracy.

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Anonymous OP 1d

I’m mainly curious about how others read his take on voting. He (in my view) correctly identifies the Democratic Party as being complicit in genocide, but also identifies crucial differences between the two American political parties on domestic issues (terror inflicted on immigrants or not). But he seems to claim that refusing to legitimize this terrible system by voting is the best thing to do. And I am not sure I buy not voting as some sort of beneficial thing

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Anonymous OP 1d

(I should add, as the title suggests, that much of the book focuses on americas methods of washing their hands of blame for their horrific conflicts in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Gaza)

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Well yeah I rarely change settings during lunch unless I’m in a hurry lmao. What we have is the ability to potentially change things for the better. Hard to think about all the people having their lives ruined by trump right now and not consider how they may be at least marginally less fucked under a democratic admin.

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I don’t think his worldview is consistent at all. He goes into detail about the major differences between suffering under republican and democratic admins in the states (the latter being markedly more humane towards vulnerable groups in the us) then makes this metaphor about both parties being pits of such deep depravity that you can’t see which is deeper/worse. He knows which one is worse, he just wrote all about it. Even if refusing to vote makes you feel like you’re exercising your agency or

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Anonymous OP 1d

Being a truly moral actor, functionally you are handing away your (admittedly small) chance of reducing suffering for millions of people. Unless I’m missing something I think it’s entirely performative and self serving

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I just can’t separate it from its value as a harm reduction tool. I don’t think serious people should. I’m disgusted with the Democratic Party to my core, they have almost nothing in common with what most people consider to be actual leftist policy. But I can also see that they are functionally better for many Americans that I care about so I suck it up and vote for Kamala even though she’s going to keep funding a genocide in much the same way trump did

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Real successes by your standards or my standards aren’t so much the point, it’s the relative lack of acutely horrific domestic policies from democrats where the difference is obvious and significant. They are objectively less harmful for environmental causes, issues regarding vulnerable populations (immigrants especially), issues around the national debt or justice system reform…etc. less bad matters when so many people stand to suffer so much from even small changes

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The math just doesn’t work, given the way our government is built and how many different demographics are required to fill a tent large enough to topple the parties that have existed for our whole existence, your vote for a third party is purely a protest and maybe moral salve to help you feel like you did something. Outright restructuring of the electoral system can be perused without wasting your vote for harm reduction

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