I mean, it should not be difficult to understand the problems with a democracy can hold and rule some territory in which the residents have no representation in government and are systematically repressed and yet still be a democracy . How could such a judgment go wrong?
Did I say they were, thread cop?
This is a really big get for the Democrats. It definitely puts AZ in play in 2020.
The Americans who were living in Iraq while we occupied it also got to vote for the occupying government while the Iraqis didn’t.
While military occupation does have some aspects in common with fascism, I’d argue it’s its own thing.
I didn’t say fascism, I said apartheid.
The occupation of the West Bank is a settler program, not just a military occupation. It isn’t temporary, it’s permanent. It’s a land and resource grab.
If the US had started building permanent settlements for US citizens in Iraq, and separated Iraqis from arable land and water to make them exclusively available to the American citizens living there, then maybe you’d have a comparable wrong. Not that the US invasion and occupation wasn’t wrong; it just wasn’t a settlement program.
Now, Puerto Rico, Guam, etc., on the other hand. . .
Sorry about the confusion – too many semantic arguments so close together, lol. Apartheid was the name for a specific policy, but yes there are some similarities there as well.
As for US occupation, I’m sure we sent non-military to live there and took over locations where others lived, but you’re right it wasn’t permanent (although if the government took over my apartment, I’d move and therefore consider it permanent regardless). While I wonder what percentage of Israelis actually want to permanently occupy Gaza in lieu of being peaceful neighbors and permanent occupation isn’t technically policy, in practice it certainly seems to be the case; it’s been going on for decades with no end in sight.
There are six hundred thousand Israelis living in the occupied territories. Two-thirds of them live in the West Bank and the rest in East Jerusalem. It’s not a handful of civilian administrators, diplomats, and aids.
I’m … not arguing that?
You are, right here:
Um … no. I was comparing.
An argument: “No, such and such didn’t happen”
A comparison: “Such and such happened, and this is where it’s similar”
Yeah, I decided not to continue derailing the democrat thread with further talk of Israel, since I had already told you that there’s a whole separate thread for it. It seemed hypocritical to continue to engage on the subject.
But what I said was correct. I didn’t withdraw it because I changed my mind.
Valid point, which you’d made earlier and I’d passed over. My communications skills must be turning to mush (assuming they were once decent in the first place, which is perhaps a stretch).
It’s cool, it’s just this thead has a lot of interesting info posted by folks like Triggercut, and it’s crappy for it to get buried under me arguing about Israel.
It’s not like we can’t talk about it. It just seems silly to not use the thread dedicated to it.
Yes, that’s right. Sorry for the derail.
Sounds like the Senate will vote on the Green New Deal soon.
Fingers crossed.
McConnell wants to force moderates (and maybe some Presidential candidates) to go on the record for/against it. As per usual the GND is getting spun into “we’re going to turn into Venezuela and all of you are going to starve!” It’s not prescriptive legislation, more a declaration of principles. I suspect a majority of Democrats will vote against it (or vote present.)
Anyway, as an aside here’s a decent take on the GND’s biggest issue - it doesn’t really address sprawl (transportation is the biggest contributor to CO2 emissions in the US and that in large part is due to our highways and suburbs.)
America is a nation of sprawl. More Americans live in suburbs than in cities, and the suburbs that we build are not the gridded, neighborly Mayberrys of our imagination. Rather, the places in which we live are generally dispersed, inefficient, and impossible to navigate without a car. Dead-ending cul-de-sacs and the divided highways that connect them are such deeply engrained parts of the American landscape that it’s easy to forget that they were themselves the fruits of a massive federal investment program.
Sprawl is made possible by highways. This is expensive—in 2015, the Victoria Transport Policy Institute estimated that sprawl costs America more than $1 trillion a year in reduced business activity, environmental damage, consumer expenses, and other costs. Leaving aside the emissions from the 1.1 billion trips Americans take per day (87 percent of which are taken in personal vehicles), spreading everything out has eaten up an enormous amount of natural land.
Environmentalists know transportation is the elephant in the room. At first blush, the easiest way to attack that problem is to electrify everything, and that’s largely what the Green New Deal calls for, with goals like “100 percent zero emission passenger vehicles by 2030” and “100 percent fossil-free transportation by 2050.” The cars we drive feel more easily changeable than the places we live.
But electric vehicles are nowhere near ready for widespread adoption—and even if they were, “half of the world’s consumption of oil would remain untouched,” Bloomberg reports. A Tesla in every driveway just won’t cut it.
But electric vehicles are nowhere near ready for widespread adoption—and even if they were, “half of the world’s consumption of oil would remain untouched,” Bloomberg reports. A Tesla in every driveway just won’t cut it.
I’m against sprawl — I think we’ll eventually all have to live in high-density population centers with public transport infrastructure and leave the rest of the land to produce food — but that Mother Jones argument isn’t very good. The reason a Tesla in every driveway doesn’t stop fossil fuel use is because of power generation, which is surely the subject of a separate set of GND policies not directly related to transportation. It’s like saying that new diet you’re on won’t help your broken leg.
Yeah that article doesn’t make sense. The GND explicitly calls for “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources”, which means that electric vehicles would be carbon neutral.
And if we aren’t ready to put an electric vehicle in every driver, then we’re even less ready to put every person in high density population centers.
Yeah that occurred to me after I posted it and they would have been better served to leave the subtext out (“a Tesla in every driveway.”) I think what they’re driving at is that it’s almost a certainty that we won’t have 100% EV in 10 years, but in the mean time we can (should, probably won’t) address urban planning to mitigate the amount of sprawl we have (which would also aid in the high cost of housing in most urban areas.)