This issue didn’t magically happen in 2016… the attempts to chip away at voting rights had been happening for a while prior to 2016…
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I admittedly just get a bit perturbed by the NON U.S. RESIDENTS bitching and moaning and trying to tell me what’s what in my own country.
Isn’t that the same bullshit that other nations accuse the U.S. of doing on a consistent basis? kind of leaves me feeling a bit…
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Yep. That’s been a particular touchstone for me about the general political tenor here: Calls for change (that others would carry out), and not sticking one’s own neck out much.
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I’m fine with them pointing out that an OECD country can have single-payer universal healthcare and strong banking regulations and such without turning into a Soviet hellhole. But when that turns into the kind of “my ffabulous country never could be and never has been as evil as the U.S.” arrogance we see from certain of those commenters then, yeah, it’s BS.
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Oh come now, surely cheering on Hamas isn’t the only way to object to Israeli state dispossession, torture, murder, and en masse open-air imprisonment of Palestinians?
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No, it isn’t, but BB stays away from it because there’s not yet an effective and established liberal-democratic Palestinian opposition organisation to speak out against those things. BB will occasionally go along with condemnations of particularly egregious examples by organisations such as Amnesty International or the UNHRC.
Otherwise, I can’t blame BB for keeping clear of that decades-long tyre fire and all the toxic fumes (ultra-nationalists from both parties, anti-Semites, American neoCons, Xtianists, Jewish and Muslim fundies, etc.) a discussion of it usually throws off.
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Depends for me what they have to say. Oh how I wish, for instance, that the average USian knew 1/10 of what @Wanderfound knows about what’s what in their country.
Living outside the U.S. can mean existing outside of the massively delusional ideology and propaganda machine that is, basically, U.S. society. And therefore, seeing much about it that those living there are so strongly discouraged from seeing. It’s very hard NOT to be delusional in many ways about the U.S. while living there.
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Oh really? Do you have your notes handy from the BB Executive Board meeting at which this policy was decided? Or maybe you read it on some back pages here that I’ve missed? (Just wondering how you know BB’s apparently official policy on this so well.)
Yes, there are indeed so many justifications out there for cowardice, and/or willful disinterest and disregard.
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No, I’ve just noticed over the years that in practise they only touch the topic when they have a recognised liberal “good guy” organisation like Amnesty backing them up on their condemnation or (in Cory’s case) when an Israeli company is exporting its technologies of oppression used on Palestinians abroad.
You’ll have to take that up with BB’s management. I’m pointing out what I’ve observed.
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Or perhaps it is such a complex spaghetti bowl of issue, with religious, racial and political overtones that it tends to lend itself to oversimplified moralizing and absolutism that many of us find pretty distasteful. Hard to find the good guys here.
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I agree with the sentiment here. But sometimes it comes across from some folks as a bit “holier than thou art” and its fucking grating. Especially when you or I aren’t the ones who are delusional. Go spread the good word over at the Fox News forums and threads.
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I don’t know about you, but one kind of “good guys” for me are “the oppressed.” You know, like those who have their homes stolen and demolished to make way for “settlements” that they’re not allowed to live in.
The Israeli authorities have shattered thousands of Palestinian lives, exposing men, women and children to years of trauma and anxiety through their deeply discriminatory policy of first denying building permits, and then bulldozing people’s homes, schools, and herding structures.
–Magdalena Mughrabi, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa
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I suppose if you are prepared to cheer on folks who drop rockets on civilian areas and promote a radical Islamic interpretation of their religion. If you oversimplify, it gets easy to choose sides. I don’t. There is enough history in the area and overlapping claims of oppression that as an outsider I do not think I can impose my values on the area. As I said, hypercomplex and way huge numbers of layers. I am not engaging in a debate that is not solvable until the folks involved make it so.
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Like maybe they could just kill fewer people? Kiling people is bad? ← oversimplified moralizing and absolutism
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Let us review what “not engaging” means. I am NOT ENGAGING.
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We’re getting way off-topic here (yet another reason BB’s management tends to avoid this discussion). Getting back to the main issue, yes, of course “BB liberals” and the Authors are going to avoid any implication that they support violent redress, authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, kleptocrats, or eliminationism (present on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) and will therefore tend to want to avoid the mess and all its built-in derails entirely in this forum.
That said, BB liberals don’t shy away from criticising the DNC and its anti-progressive attitudes in the way that mainstream liberals in the U.S. do. They balance that out with an understanding that, realistically in a duopoly party system, the focus has to be on reform rather than the ragequitting performed by Bernie Bros in 2016 (or by the PUMAs in 2008).
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Apologies. I guess I should have “not engaged” earlier.
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Oh, and BTW, feel free to nag any Canadians of your acquaintance in a year’s time. We haven’t even really started to creep back from the abyss, and if we get complacent, what little distance we have gained will be used to get a good run-up.
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