No one needs you to feel hate. Hate is what's in your mind, and whether you feel that is between you and your sense of self. This is just about where we send money. Call it tough love if that feels better.

Do I hate the Russians we sanction? Not really. I don't know them. Some are likely perfectly lovely people. Some are even liberals or hate Putin too. But we are treating them as an entire population group, that's what we can do.

Should there be downsides to embracing fascism, or not?

We need at least one cycle of reprisal to stop them from hitting the defect button every time

Personally I'm not OK on a practical level with trying to proxy other demographics as Trump voters, but I get @rev-avocado.bsky.social's moral logic here, and wrt endless reprisals: there was a political system set up to arbitrate disputes, and they chose to reject and break it! What's left?

There are plenty of *specific, identifiable people* who have committed crimes and should be punished. I reject the notion of enemy populations a priori; the other path leads to people saying shit like “we are justified in starving Gazan children bc their parents voted for Hamas”

Hence why I said on a practical level that I'm uncomfortable with proxying stuff like this, it's inevitably going to get innocent and blameless people caught in the net.

I think it is probably good to be uncomfortable about this stuff. I am not, but as Bill said, I'm in a pretty dark place. They put me here, and until they stop trying to destroy my family, I don't know if it'll be possible for me to leave.

I hear you and it is one of the many battles we are waging - to keep hold of our own goodness in the face of a lot of evil. and they really don't deserve our souls on top of everything else they are taking.

saw this the other day in a shop

Bro do you want to talk later? Is this something more than just the general news?

Stressful day, but no mostly the general news. The steady buildup of disasters and the looming ones that are inexorably coming are rolling in my chest.

Yeah, I'm not doing well either.

These people are demons.

This is true in a general moral sense, but at a certain point you lose the agency to make those types of distinctions anymore. At a certain point it’s effectively just an enemy army and the only choice left is them or you.

Israelis would say they literally are faced with an enemy army and the choice is me or you. I hate maga but they have not October 7thed my family

Israeli propaganda is nigh indistinguishable from shit that would be posted in Der Stürmer, it's very Goebbelsesque, only rightwing monsters or imperialist-brainwashed dupes support it.

They would if they could.

They are also visibly and aggressively building the capabilities and consent to do so.

They call me and my family invaders. They are already kidnapping people every day.

The Israelis are the ones with all the guns and all the money and diplomatic recognition, and therefore they have vastly more moral agency to make these types of calls than the Palestinians (which they used to commit genocide) Suffice to say, Democrats are not the Israelis in this analogy.

Not really. Gazans didn't vote to starve Gazan children, that's something non-Gazans are imposing on them.

The equivalent metaphor re Gaza would be allowing Hamas to govern Gaza after Gazans voted for Hamas.

If this were limited to “we’re not bailing you out,” fine. But rev is saying something much harsher than that, which is we should hope they die out

Did Gazans deserve to be ruled by Hamas? No. Did they choose it that one time? Yes. I fully support rural Republicans having opportunities to change their minds and vote to be governed differently, which is unfortunately not an opportunity Gazans ever had.

If they're never made to feel the consequence of always voting for fascism then they're never going to stop voting for it. They did this to themselves. Bailing them out will simply tell them it's fine to keep voting Republican.

A big part of why deliverism didn't work for Biden is that Republicans were allowed to get away with voting against all the deliverism but then going and taking credit for it among their constituents. Lots of low info voters out there who sincerely think the deliverism came from the GOP!

I’m not one of those people who is going to bend over backwards to see the good in people who hate me either and frankly I want Philly and the collar counties to secede from Pennsylvania. But I don’t want to turn the state entirely into a tool of repression

You are probably a better person than I am.