Rayvin

The more I see of Harris, the more impressed I am as she steps out of Biden's shadow. Trump losing to a woman of colour will be amazing either way, but the fact that she is clearly capable of being a very good president will also be a blessing.

Did he ever get to meet Trump in the end whilst on his pilgrimage?

My bad, it's difficult to tell on here sometimes. I remain fairly neutral on this personally as long as they actually reduce child poverty somehow.

Tbh I think NJS' post is plausible although I would argue that it's good politics by Starmer if so? If he has to make some pointless statement against the left to appease the brainless before enacting the policy further down the line anyway then tbh.. I'm ok with that. As long as the right thing gets done, I'm pretty relaxed on whatever bullshit has to be done to arrive at it.

What is it you think I'm arguing for? I tried to make my comment as neutral as possible because I don't actually know what Labour's proposed approach for dealing with this is. You've been a bit trigger happy on this one my old friend

What are the thoughts on the two child benefit cap issue? Seems to be a clear sign that Labour are going to stick to their promises to the letter and not surprise us. I've not seen any discussion around this issue beyond headlines in fairness so I assume Labour have an alternative approach to combat child poverty.

I think Biden was likely the most empowered of all non-directly affected international leaders, but I'm not saying I expected him to change it. I'm saying I expected him to call it out. Which he did - but if you remember I said very early on in that whole thing that for me, Biden had to either call for a ceasefire straight out of the gate, or back Israel to the end. If he just waited for the death toll to pass some arbitrary limit, I would be fucking pissed because it implies that he felt that an acceptable number of civilian casualties were worth it to allow Israel a revenge strike. His arbitrary number was 30,000 dead - here's the post I made back in November saying what my view was going to be on this:

Completely agree about those two but let's not pretend that we're above the same sort of behaviour. Russia will have been delighted to be able to characterise the US as morally inconsistent because of things like this. We can agree to disagree here honestly but I do expect more from the US than what they showed. It was actually the last Trump presidency that convinced me that for all they're annoying on the global scene, we really do need the US to be the leaders of the Western world. It's noticeable when they fall back. I do think in this case, they failed to show leadership.

As I've said before, I do actually understand why Israel responded in the way it did at a human level. I am not saying I wouldn't respond in the same way ultimately, but that is why justice in our societies is taken out of the hands of the victims. Because they are unlikely to take the 'right' and balanced course. Only in the international sphere do we seem to be unable to comprehend this. Which is why countries like the US, who claim to be friends to Israel, should have counselled them against perpetuating more grief, despair and death - which will impact both sides. China, Russia, France (3 UN Security Council members) on the 'for' list... I mean look at the 'against' list, it's US, Israel and no one else of any significance. The UN does indeed have no power to say anything about this but that's a goalpost shift. We were talking about international condemnation - I've evidenced it for you. Whether you accept that 121 counties against 14 at a UN vote 3 weeks after October 7th qualifies as the international community speaking out or not, it does for me. It's actually fairly elitist to suggest that the international community is only relevant as far as UNSC members tbh (and even then, the majority of the UNSC backed ceasefire). Take France here - do we think that they hate Israel? Or maybe Macron had the leadership to be able to see the clusterfuck for what it was going to become.

I'm not, I'm comparing the mental thought patterns that we seem fine to use for one and not the other. Also I'm not calling what Israel is doing a genocide, I'm still benefit of the doubt on it with my desperate hope that they are a country simply in a lot of pain that doesn't actually want to completely eradicate all Palestinians. Call it my naivety. I'm simply saying that given their actions radicalise more people to join Hamas, they aren't winning without a genocide. Some of the international community called it out immediately. A ceasefire was tabled at the UN in the same month it kicked off. 121 countries voted in favour of it. The UK "bravely" abstained, but the US voted against it with only 13 others. That was October 27th, 2023. The reason you think opinion shifted only recently is because the US finally accepted that it had a moral responsibility to fall in line with most of the rest of the world.

My point is that if I could tell that we would reach a stage where everyone was calling for a ceasefire early on in developments, then US intelligence would be able to do so. And therefore all the time wasted in them finding the balls to call out clear reality (as if Israel was ever going to be able to eliminate Hamas without an actual genocide ffs) is a cost measured in human lives. Maybe Israel would have completely ignored it, as they are doing, but at least the US would have shown it had principled leadership when it came to the lives of innocents. It is absolutely OK to call out the complete failure in western leadership on this. I mean we knew Brexit would be a fuck up. We called that out. This is the same principle. It's a humanitarian catastrophe that everyone knew it would be, and pretending that we can't call that shit out is doing no one any favours. We are better than this.

We don't, but we do know that whatever they were doing behind the scenes presumably didn't work, leading to them eventually having to publicly call for a ceasefire. I also think the US spent some time claiming that Israel was justified in defending itself iirc. Either way though, it's not our job to justify what they do - it's our job to put forward our views so that they listen to us/represent those views. If people weren't complaining about the US failing to call out Israel, we might be a lot further away from a resolution than we are now. We aren't politicians, we don't have to balance the situation for them. EDIT - let's also not forget that if it has been 'self evident' that Biden should step down, and that we were all mystified that he couldn't see this - why would we have any more faith in his judgement over Gaza? He seems to be someone who needs to be yelled at repeatedly to do the right thing.

Maybe so but the world looks to the US for leadership and Biden dithered on the Israel/Gaza issue for months. He should have come right out from the start and called for a ceasefire like he knew he'd inevitably have to do at some point, and decided to wait for an incredible number of people to die before he'd do the right thing. Presumably in the hope that Israel would 'get it out of their system' with a few tens of thousands. Let's not start becoming so pragmatic about these things that needing 30,000 dead before he will make the right decision is somehow considered to be acceptable. That said, the Green Party are also allowed to make the odd comment, as politicians do, supporting an outcome that they wanted to see without endorsing literally everything the guy stood for.

Yeah but I wonder if there are suspicions around the training methodology on that front. I could see interference there being an unsettling point for Howe.

ICJ has ruled that Israels occupation of Palestine is an annexation, that it is unlawful, and that Palestine is due reparations for 57 years of abuse. Finally, a legitimate body has the balls to call this situation for what it is. So now to the UK. Do we support an internationalist body like the ICJ, or are we going to suit ourselves. The implication seems to be that Israel should be hit with sanctions. https://www.theguardian.com/law/article/2024/jul/19/why-icj-ruling-against-israel-settlement-policies-hard-to-ignore-occupation-palestinian-territories?