jnsq.org
Tired of Capitalism, tired of Fascism, and tired of being tired.
they/them
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Setting foot on that lawn without authorization gets you immediately arrested. Doing it en masse would probably get most of the people involved shot. But there are in fact protests on the other side of that fence on a nearly daily basis.
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The Uncommitted movement came from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. It was only an insurgent movement from the perspective of people supporting the guy who had taken more AIPAC money than anyone in history, and then his pre-chosen successor.
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Third party punishment (also known as altruistic punishment) is still effective when (and sometimes more effective because) it involves sacrifice. People start asking why, and then you say "she doubled down on genocide" and some of them think that maybe genocide is something that loses votes.
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At that range it was probably only a *half* million dollar missile.
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There's loads of research on this, and if people don't follow through on their conditions, they reliably get worse offers in the future. That's why actual Palestinian groups were encouraging this strategy. They've been thrown under the bus for 77 years. Short term thinking hasn't helped them. 2/2
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Elections are iterative games based on reputation. If I say "commit to ending the genocide so I can support you" and I support them anyway, I forfeit my bargaining power to demand they stop the next genocide, because they know I'll vote for them anyway. 1/
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DC, along with a few hundred thousand of my closest friends. Largest action I've ever been to by an order of magnitude.
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People who got fired for writing too much memory unsafe code complained about it on Reddit at exactly the time this was happening. If those posts were fake, they put a lot of work into faking it.
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Kamala Harris promised unconditional support for Israel.
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The people pushing the "we should throw trans people under the bus" analysis aren't moderates. They're centrists. They're fighting hard to cast blame elsewhere because they know they own this fuckup. They are terrified of being held accountable for it next primary season.
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It made things worse for the people who gave us a shitty choice too. That's how third party punishment keeps weakly competitive systems somewhat responsive. Without it, the deal on the table gets worse every single time. Which is what the Democratic Party has done for most of the past half century.
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This time the Democratic Party decided that it was willing to marginalize the "no genocide" faction, and risk negative consequences. They're now experiencing negative consequences, and that will motivate different decisions in the future. 4/4
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There will always be people who aren't satisfied, and that's normal. Every large political formation since the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth has arrived at consensus by deciding which extremes to exclude. That includes both major parties for their entire histories. 3/
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Most of the people who abstained or voted third party would have voted for Harris if she had said she'd support even the slightest bit of material pressure on Israel to negotiate a ceasefire. The demand wasn't a complete abandonment of Capitalism and Imperialism, just a modest improvement. 2/
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Next time when someone suggests that throwing the early primary money to 99% Hitler will lead to more donor money later on, someone will say "We tried that last time with 90% Hitler and it didn't work. Maybe we should play it safe and aim for 80% Hitler this time" and then win in a landslide. 1/
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Nobody thought that abstention would have more immediate impact. Third party punishment is a strategy that risks or sacrifices short term benefits to coerce better offers in the future. The important thing is that the people who said "Trump is awful, so we can get away with being bad" ate shit. 1/
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Some of the people responsible for restricting our choices like that lost power and money, because there's less of both in the opposition than in power. Not enough, but some. They will serve as an example for the future.
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The trouble with terms like that is you give cover for other people who use them in different ways. I don't know about "zit", but "zio" is often used like "globalist" by the sorts of people who like to push the boundaries of the Overton Window. So be careful.
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Last time I saw one of those, it was people borrowing "zio" from white supremacists. You need to be very careful with those.
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Kamala Harris would have gone through the consent manufacturing rituals and gotten a proper resolution to do something similar after Israel's missile defenses crumbled more. That that would have worked is damning of all of us, either for what we have done or failed to do.
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Is "zit" a new slur?
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Yeah, it's an embarrassing failure, and the party insiders own that failure more than anyone else. How many times can they lose what should be the easiest elections ever before people stop listening to them?
Notice how Hillary Clinton didn't run again?
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More missiles are making it through Israeli defenses though. Success in a war of attrition means losing slower than the other side.
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It tells me that they did in fact have a nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that they didn't feel like being forthcoming about it after Israel assassinated a bunch of their scientists, especially after Trump broke the deal Obama negotiated.
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If you're that mad about this, maybe you'll think twice next time someone draws a red line for you.
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Russia has been buying Iranian weapons because Iran built a lot of production capacity, not all of it easily accessible to Israeli weapons.
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Every Presidential election of my adult life was "the wrong time" for the left to vote their conscience. Eventually people realize they're playing a long term game rather than a series of completely separate short term games, and that the people responsible for that are dangerous.
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Yes, that is how wars of attrition go. Both sides are severely depleted.
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They've done enrichment post-2003. They've not done weaponization work, and our own intelligence confirmed that just a few months ago.
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The Tea Party happened in 2010 because Citizens United happened in 2010, and all the party insiders know it, even if they want to claim that the ACA provoked the backlash for their own reasons.
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Third party punishment never is a watershed moment. It makes them possible later.
The line in the sand was very clear: no bombs for genocide. The next time we have to say that, the people who dismissed it will think twice about it.
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And they would have gotten 90% of what they wanted with Harris. But now moderate Democrats are starting to think that maybe unconditional support is going too far.
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They must have done a really shitty job if their code was full of memory safety defects that automated static analysis could find.
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They gambled that taking AIPAC money and support was a better option than a more likely victory, and now it'll cost them. AIPAC will reward their loyalty, but they'd be better off if they had won, and they know it. Betting on AIPAC was a hedged bet, but still a bet. 2/2
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Schumer won't, but the party is a lot more than elected officials. The "revolving door" campaign consultants would much rather have administration jobs than bouncing from campaign to campaign. The party in power has more favors to trade. 1/
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Ben-Gvir has been threatening people who post footage of successful strikes, so not a lot of it has been getting out, but Iran is doing a lot of damage. Israel is looking for an excuse to declare victory here, because they can't keep this up much longer. 2/2
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Iran isn't effectively stopping Israel's attacks, but Israel's air defenses are getting overwhelmed. They couldn't protect the refinery at Haifa, for example, which is (or was) a critical strategic asset, and ports and military bases have been hit repeatedly. Iran hit Ben-Gurion last night. 1/
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The hospital they hit was a 0.1% miss at ~2000 km. Our bases in the Persian Gulf would be more like 200 km strikes from some sites. If they fired hundreds of missiles that miss by at most 200m, it would be absolute devastation. They didn't do that because of deterrence, not inability. 2/2
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They're mostly hitting military and mixed use strategic targets, or narrowly missing them, at much greater range than our bases on the edge of the Persian Gulf, which have much less missile defense. 1/
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We probably did destroy some Uranium enrichment equipment, but they stopped pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003, as our own intelligence assessments confirmed. We mildly inconvenienced them, and they continued bombing the shit out of Israel. 3/3
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That's why for this attack we warned them in advance (like they did for the attack on our base) and told them we wouldn't escalate further if they didn't retaliate. They moved their stuff and we bombed mostly empty holes in the ground. 2/
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The same way they retaliated at our base in Iraq immediately afterward, which our defenses couldn't stop. They could have done a lot more of that. That attack was just a technology demonstration, to warn what they could do if we fucked with them again. 1/
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Yes, but the point is that it also goes poorly for the people who made the decision to cross that bright red line. This is essential for negotiating a better deal in markets and iterative games (like elections) that are weakly competitive.
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The crises that are hurting Democrats in the US are the third party punishment. That's what gives power to people who say "fuck you" and don't accept any of the deals that were offered. Nobody in the Democratic Party wants this to happen again.
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Harris found out it wasn't a bluff and that people really were willing to risk losing to send a message that genocide is non-negotiable. The people within the party who pushed for that have less power now as a result.
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The AIPAC crowd is fighting like hell for Cuomo right now in NYC because Mamdani and Lander represent a rejection of machine politics that's threatening to them, even though there's no policy angle there for them. They're at least rattled right now. 4/4
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It would have been better if there had been more internal agreement about what to do next, but the entire premise of Uncommitted was that they had no good next electoral option. Within that scope, they did what they could. Whether or not it was enough, we'll see in 2026, 2028, and 2030. 3/
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Ambiguity is sometimes strategically useful in negotiation. If the people you're trying to convince believe that nothing that's acceptable to them will be acceptable to you, they have no reason to budge. 2/