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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32964 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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I would support Biden over Ron DeSantis at this point- I would be genuinely afraid of what Ron would do at the behest of Israel.

I'm not sure if you intend this to be hyperbolic, but it seems like a rather strange point to me. If we take it seriously, this means that the primary issue by far that you care about is our foreign relations with Israel. Love them or hate them, it's a pretty small fraction of our overall GDP and total foreign aid budget, and a fairly minor factor in our overall foreign relations. Even so, that means to you, it's far more important than any of:

  • Abortion rights

  • Gun rights

  • Tax and economic policy

  • Criminal justice

  • Overall foreign relations

  • Environmental policy

And any number of other hot-button issues that have far more effect on any American's daily life than exactly what our relations with Israel are like and how much money we give to them.

Freedom of speech is an important issue. There were high hopes that Trump would make real progress in promoting free speech norms as public squares on the internet. With DeSantis signing hate speech laws in Jerusalem, the "free speech" issue would almost certainly be worse under a DeSantis administration than a Biden administration. Let's say he becomes president and signs a federal law like this one in Jerusalem. Do you think that's a silly concern, and can you see why I would give that a lot of weight?

DeSantis is signing law that is going to be used to crack down on right-wing expression. If I'm on the right wing, why wouldn't I give that a higher priority than taxes or abortion?

Biden has been better at foreign relations than Trump. Biden actually pulled US forces out of Afghanistan, Trump never did. Trump's most notable foreign policy accomplishments were moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and breaking the Iranian nuclear deal. All indications are that DeSantis would follow the exact same pattern.

More important than the law itself is that this signals that DeSantis is going to be beholden to the Jewish NGOs that have been the most influential in changing content policies on internet platforms. So I would have 0 expectation that DeSantis would fight that influence in any way, this is a clear signal that he's going to work with them to fight antisemitism.

SS has been very consistent with that priority list, yes.

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