https://xcancel.com/the_ason/status/1832226873155129688

  • christian [he/him]
    ·
    12 days ago

    I feel like this doesn't need a breakdown, but the way Shaun is phrasing this suggests that Biden's motive is bloodlust. If, by some bizarre hypothetical, Israel shifted to some other atrocity, maybe imagine an abstract environmental horror that will only begin to effect people generations after he's gone, if it's something else, Biden is not bothered that Palestinians are no longer dying. He simply does not care about them in any way shape or form. They are numbers. Same goes for the "see you dead" bit, a poor person dying is a number.

    What he's saying isn't wrong, but it's phrased to suggest bloodlust when it's really a consequence of seeing poor people's deaths as a statistical change.

    Biden has the power to change things here, the distinction isn't actually important in his case. But people are going to be upset with the implication of bloodlust because all of us reading are living lives where (unlike Joe Biden), seeing deaths of people we've never met as statistics is a coping strategy for living in this world. We've lived that our whole lives and it's hard to imagine different. But if one of us is feeling bloodlust, that needs to be addressed.

    In conclusion, anyone upset with Shaun's tweet is guilty of humanizing Joe Biden too much. Humanizing someone else, anyone else, is a natural thing to do and it should be expected that people will react badly to this tweet. Yeah, you can think things through, but that doesn't change what a normal gut reaction is going to be here.

    • catonkatonk [none/use name]
      ·
      12 days ago

      I don't think he should care about people's gut reactions. The genocide is actively harmful to America's imperial interests and Biden's own ambitions for the middle east (normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia for example). It's harmful to most capitalists except for the weapons goons. I don't think it's accurate to say that what is happening is simply because of an inability to see Palestinians as human and thus not caring about their extermination because they stand in the way of some logical goal. That logical reason exists for the vassal state, of course, but many vassal states have desires that the Americans will not allow them to indulge.

      We have no reluctance to look at many historical genocides and to determine that blood lust and racial animosity were primary drivers. Why should this one be different? We have, on record, some of the most bloodthirsty comments ever publicly made by government officials in Israel, we know that beyond the pragmatic desire to control greater territory, Israel is in the grip of a violent mania. Why should that not extend to the one essentially telling them to do it?

      • christian [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        12 days ago

        I guess putting more thought into this, I'm posting because I have imagined some standards for what deserves to be posted to this comm that I barely pay attention to and want to complain loudly that this is low-hanging fruit. Really every community needs someone butting in from time to time to say "Have some dignity people!"

          • christian [he/him]
            ·
            12 days ago

            I think I envisioned the difference between the comms as being determined by the societal status of the person saying the bullshit or the traction it gets, and not the by potency of the bullshit itself. This has minimal potency. Have some dignity people!