Humor me for a second. Quick poll. You can just write “Yes” or “No” in the comments.

  • athos77@kbin.social
    161·
    6 months ago

    Israel currently has enough weapons stockpiled that they could continue the genocide for several months before they’d need to consider changing tactics. I don’t see what use sending them additional weapons/munitions does - just stick it in a warehouse until they need it next winter? It’s just a visible show of support right now.

    Cut off that support. Let Israel swing in the wind without unconditional support and maybe they’ll finally start pulling back from all-out extermination. Make sure any future shipments are bound with enforceable limits on their use, like the US has on almost every other arms shipment it makes. And take whatever we were going to send to Israel for the next six months, and send it to Ukraine, which actually is fighting a war for it’s very survival against a much larger adversary.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
    15·
    6 months ago

    I don’t support sending ANYTHING to Israel. They aren’t a scrappy start up needing our help anymore and haven’t been for decades.

    That said, I understand WHY we continue supporting them:

    https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=Q05

    https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/industry-detail/Q05/2022

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/22/aipac-pro-israel-lobby-group-us-elections

    https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2024-05-02/ty-article/.premium/aipac-halts-campaign-fundraising-for-republicans-who-voted-against-emergency-israel-aid/0000018f-39d5-d17f-adcf-f9f7dfb40000

    https://thehill.com/homenews/4606301-pro-israel-groups-target-progressive-lawmakers-primaries/

  • Horsey@kbin.social
    10·
    6 months ago

    Not unless they were getting Ukraine’d by Egypt/Jordan/Lebanon/Syria. Since they’re not, they can make do imho.

        • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
          1·
          6 months ago

          I think they are diversifying their tactics; just doing “Genocide Joe union buster amirite fellow kids” stuff wasn’t working real well after a while.

          My prediction for the next things we’ll see (in addition to a continuation of the fellow-kids stuff from existing accounts) is:

          1. Leftist accounts calling for violence against the state, because clearly that’s the only answer, and implying anyone who wants to work within the system for change is naive and wasting their time
          2. More accounts from all over the place – pro-Biden accounts that are also pro-Israel, a bunch of pro-Trump accounts like this guy, total oddball viewpoints like the guy yesterday that was mad at Bernie Sanders for being pro-Israel and marching in lock step with the DNC, etc. All acting hostile to everyone in a way that makes it unpleasant to participate. Just sort of general pollution and confusion to the discussion.
      • go_go_gadget@lemmy.world
        214·
        6 months ago

        🙄 I said people who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries mostly support giving weapons to Israel. But go off I guess. Fucking asshole.

        • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
          81·
          6 months ago

          You weren’t directing a question at the group of people who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries (except by accidental overlap) – you asked Lemmy readers specifically, regardless of who they voted for, a particular question based around the premise that they were Israel supporters, and then you swore that the way they answered implied that their support for Israel was being confirmed. Pretty much no one here supports Israel.

          This is bringing me back to my idea of the politics sub that’s auto-filtered in some way to weed out the weird accounts so that all the rest of us can just talk normal. I’ve spent like 30-40 minutes on this whole weird conversation at this point today (why, I don’t know) which could have been spent on literally anything else.

            • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
              2·
              6 months ago

              I love talking with people who disagree with me. Honestly I think I have something wrong with me, for how much I like arguing on the internet.

              But also, I think that the presence of so many people who are deliberately coming in to distort the narrative being presented is a bad thing. It absolutely swings elections, for one thing – the rise of social media influence campaigns as a factor in elections has been pretty well documented, and it’s not a good thing.

              It’s obviously not real easy to detect someone who’s saying X because they believe it, as distinct from someone who’s saying X because this is one of 50 accounts they run that is designed to push X as a popular opinion on social media. Every social media platform except Twitter has dedicated teams for this stuff. I think Lemmy’s admins are already overwhelmed running their instances, and it’s not fair to ask them to also do this more or less impossible task, but just leaving it alone and letting the shills come in and do 10 posts a day about how Biden betrayed us and as a good American I’m not voting in the election, and leaving it to the users to argue it out with them every single time every single day, isn’t really the way either.

              I don’t think you can do it by viewpoint, to create an echo chamber. That’s obviously a bunch of crap. I did do some little experiments with a couple of ways to do it, having an LLM detect certain bad-faith techniques automatically or mechanically detecting shill accounts through their behavior, but it’s obviously not a real simple or easy thing to do. I definitely haven’t figured out something that I feel like is “yes this is the way, this works well.”

              • Eheran@lemmy.world
                2·
                6 months ago

                At this point I somewhat agree with you. The same way emails are filtered because there is SO much spam or worse things floating around. But I’m such a forum I think it should be done on a user basis, not message basis. So if someone constantly says something and does not actually react to replies, so no discussion, just dumping something, then this should be stopped. Regardless of what the actual message is, what the intentions are, if that is a real person or a bot. Randomly dumping messages hardly has value. But how to detect that is indeed the issue. Even with LLM since they can be used to counter themselves, but they would help against the low effort posts.

                • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
                  2·
                  6 months ago

                  Yeah. That was more or less the conclusion I came to – it’s too hard for the LLM to follow the flow of conversation well enough to really determine if someone’s “acting in good faith” or whatever, and it’s way too easy for it to interpret someone making a joke as being serious, that kind of thing. (Or, maybe GPT-4 can do it if you want to pay for that for API access for every user that wants to post, but I don’t want to do that).

                  But it seems even a cheap LLM is pretty capable of distilling down, what are the things that people are claiming (or implying as an assumption), and did someone challenge them on it, and then did they respond substantively / respond combatively / change the subject / never respond. That seems like it works and you can do it kinda cheaply. And, it means that someone who puts out 50 messages a day (which isn’t hard to do) would then have to respond to 50 messages a day coming back asking questions, which is a lot more demanding, and creates a lot more room for an opinion that doesn’t hold up if you examine it to get exposed as such. But, it wouldn’t really weigh in on what’s the “right answer” to come to, and it wouldn’t censor from participating anyone who wanted to be there and participate in the discussion.

                  IDK. Because you asked I dusted off the code I had from before just now, and I was reminded of how not-happy-with-it-yet I was 🙂. I think there’s a good idea somewhere in there though.

        • sebinspace@lemmy.world
          51·
          6 months ago

          I don’t know anyone on this side of the aisle that supports that, atleast no one i talk to.

          However, i do absolutely see righties using it as a catch-22. In your mind, it plays like this:

          Support Israel: Complicit in Genocide

          Support Palestine: Antisemitic

          Support apathy: Complicit in Genocide

          So no, your opinion doesn’t matter to me because it can never be anything but negative.

          • go_go_gadget@lemmy.world
            14·
            6 months ago

            I don’t know anyone on this side of the aisle that supports that, atleast no one i talk to.

            So Biden went around congress to ship weapons to Israel against the wishes of the majority of people who voted for him in the 2020 primaries? Where are they? Why aren’t they furious with him right now? Why aren’t they joining the protestors?

            • sebinspace@lemmy.world
              41·
              6 months ago

              Oh that’s an even better one.

              Protest: those people need to go home/get back to class

              Don’t protest: complicit in genocide.

              • go_go_gadget@lemmy.world
                12·
                6 months ago

                This whole exchange is based on the assumption I’m a troll who speaks out both sides of my mouth which obviously I can’t disprove so there’s no point in continuing.

            • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
              3·
              6 months ago

              So Biden went around congress to ship weapons to Israel

              Yes

              against the wishes of the majority of people who voted for him in the 2020 primaries?

              IDK “majority.” I think there is a certain population that likes the Democrats and also likes Israel; I just think they get their news from TV or newspapers which give them a terribly slanted perspective. I so think that in addition to them, that somewhere in the 71% of people who oppose Biden’s support for Israel that you’ll probably find quite a few Democratic primary voters (and that almost everyone you’ll find on Lemmy has learned enough about Israel at this point that they know what a crime it is to support them.)

              Where are they? Why aren’t they furious with him right now? Why aren’t they joining the protestors?

              180,000 people were on the streets immediately when the war started, people have burned themselves to death in protest, Democratic congressional staffers say the phones don’t stop ringing at any point during the day, 100,000 people in Michigan alone voted “uncommitted” in the primary… and you’re confused about the lack of outrage?

              Just sort of assuming for no reason that there’s zero overlap between anyone who voted for Biden and anyone in that grouping, and then angrily asking the question, WHY IS THERE NO OVERLAP WHY DON’T THEY CARE?

              • go_go_gadget@lemmy.world
                11·
                6 months ago

                I don’t know what I’m expecting I guess. I’m so angry with Biden but at the end of the day I already knew he’s not really trying to support me. Sure he’ll throw my demographic a bone here and there to get some easy votes but that’s about it. My anger is purely that a politician I never wanted is doing something awful that I don’t support. That’s a regular experience.

                I’m trying to imagine what it’s like to be very much against shipping weapons to Israel and have voted for the guy in the primaries who went around congress to ship weapons to Israel. I’d be asking myself questions like “Did I vote for someone who supports genocide when there were better options?” and “Is our democracy even functional?” Of course I can’t know with absolute certainty what someone is or isn’t asking themselves in their heads. But I would suspect those kinds of questions would elicit strong words or actions.

                And also granted, there have been a lot of both. But I gotta be honest, the people I’m seeing on television do not look like the demographics who voted for Biden in the 2020 primaries. Do they to you?

                As a complete aside:

                against the wishes of the majority of people who voted for him in the 2020 primaries?

                IDK “majority.”

                Then what the fuck are you so mad at me for? That sounds pretty close to the speculation I shared with you and set you off.

                I said people who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries mostly support giving weapons to Israel.

                I don’t understand why you decided to be such a dick in this conversation.

                • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
                  1·
                  6 months ago

                  I’m not angry at you or anything like that. I’m being super hostile partly just because I can be a dick in general, but also because it seems like you’re being dishonest. If I’ve read it wrong then I apologize, but the type of thing you’re saying just doesn’t make sense to me.

                  It’s just not that complex. I’ll speak for myself: I didn’t vote for Biden in the primary. I sort of expected him to be the exact type of establishment criminal that his background as a rich white guy who’s worked in Washington all his life would suggest. Then he started doing good things for the working class and on climate change and I was surprised about it and for the first time decided he might be a good thing (instead of just not the end of the world like Trump would be). Then he started being okay with Israel slaughtering brown people and I stopped supporting him nearly as wholeheartedly – like yes, he’s returning to type as a war criminal like most US leaders; it’s still better to vote for him instead of Trump, but also we should be working to build organizations that can replace him with something much much better. I don’t think he started the war in Gaza, but he’s certainly not doing the Palestinians any favors by enabling Netanyahu to do more or less whatever he wants.

                  I don’t get where you arrived at this burning desire to decide that there are American Democrats who want to see Palestinians getting slaughtered in the streets by the thousands. I think population A hates it and opposes Biden on it, to this on-the-news-all-the-time-because-the-campus-or-the-person-is-on-fire extent, because he’s enabling it. (While, maybe, still acknowledging that he’s 10 times better than Trump by any standard.) I think another population B gets their news from establishment sources that don’t really tell them that that’s happening, that tell them that Israel is defending themselves from a terrorist attack and fighting a conventional war against armed opponents. I don’t think that’s what’s happening, but I think they think that’s what’s happening, because the news is lying to them. And so they’re okay with it. I don’t think there’s some population C that is both Democratic voters and understands what’s going on and wants Israel to be doing what they’re doing.

                  That’s it. It’s not complicated. It’s not like some thing where you have to move the goalposts around in this convoluted manner to construct a person who voted for Biden in the primary because they want to murder Palestinians and they had a premonition that Hamas would attack Israel and Netanyahu would decide to start murdering the whole country and Biden loves all of that happening and so that’s why they voted for Biden. The whole thing is cockamamie.

                  If I’ve misunderstood anything about what you’re claiming happened then feel free to enlighten me. But you kept saying that people on Lemmy are okay with killing Palestinians, which I absolutely know isn’t true, and the whole thing about the primary that you’re saying now instead, makes so little sense that it’s hard for me to take it seriously as a thing you actually believe. Sorry. If I’m a dick to you (which, maybe I shouldn’t be), that is why.