People are confusing moral and legal rights.
Women absolutely have the moral right to nut-knee someone who says that to them. I wouldn’t stop them or testify against them.
People generally don’t have the legal right to do that. If someone tries that and gets sued, it will be up to them to prove that there was an imminent credible threat. If the guy is still alive, they’ll be able to claim that YBMC is just a joke and it would be up to the victim to prove that it wasn’t.
Not rude at all. The original question is why certain people behave in a certain way.
The first point addresses the direct reason why some voters would refuse to vote for Harris due to her stance on Israel. When people believe they are being harmed they tend to focus all their attention on the immediate harm. It’s not a logical choice but people don’t act logically in these circumstances.
As an example of this, I’d offer our response to 9/11. The entire nation came together to pass the PATRIOT act and start a war in Afghanistan. There’s no logic in passing a bill that was so long that no one in congress could have read it before voting on it. It’s hard to argue for the logic of invading Afghanistan. There wasn’t really an objective (besides “get OBL”, who we later ended up assassinating in an other country) and in retrospect it’s certainly clear that it caused far more harm than good. But we were in an emotional state. The people watching their relatives getting bombed in Gaza are in a similarly emotional state.
The second point addresses why Democrats attempts to convince them are failing so spectacularly. Getting someone to vote for your preferred candidate is an exercise in persuasion. Much has been written about the art of persuasion and “insult your audience,” isn’t generally a recommended technique. One counterexample is “pickup artists”. They theorize that by insulting or “negging” women they can motivate the woman to counter the insult by seeking the mans approval. While this does work on some small percentage of women, the vast majority are more motivated to find their mace.
2 reasons jump to mind.
When I listen to people who personally identify with the people of Gaza, it goes way beyond logic. They have a completely emotional reaction. Their choices are almost completely driven by the question of, “Who is doing what, right now?” Questions of, “Who will do what 6 months from now?” take a distant back seat.
Every time the topic comes up, Democrats dogpile on them and call them morons. People will often respond with something like, “Yeah but that’s OK because they ARE morons.” I won’t argue if that’s true or not but it’s pretty obvious that line of reasoning won’t win a lot of converts.
The glaring difference between the two is our level of active involvement.
Solidarity is one thing. Actually doing something about Sudan would require some sort of deliberate intervention.
In the case of Gaza we could likely make a huge difference if we just stopped arming the aggressors.
We don’t send arms to Sudan. We don’t send arms to Putin. We don’t send arms to the Sri Lankan military. We don’t send arms to Boko Haram. We don’t send arms to Myanmar.
I’ve been thinking about this exact question recently.
My Austrian grandmother and her sister were working class teenagers during the war. They couldn’t realistically have done anything to stop the Nazis. They didn’t really do much to help but since they were seamstresses they secretly snuck the Jewish family in the building some sewing supplies. It wasn’t much and they stopped when they were told that someone had reported them to the Gestapo. Their experience during the war was dodging bombs and trying to find something to eat.
None of that matters. When I was a kid growing up in the US people regularly made Nazi jokes as soon as they found out about my heritage. Nobody was willing to entertain any ideas that maybe those civilians shouldn’t have been held accountable.
History judged all of Germany and Austria harshly. It judged the civilians harshly and it judged their descendants harshly.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144717
The world is watching.
It’s a bit more than “nobody”.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/09/1154391
The problem is that the minority that is uncomfortable doing or saying anything is backed by half the worlds carrier fleets and thousands of nuclear armed ICBMS.
It isn’t even the root of the indo-european languages and the Indo-European languages are just one of many language families around the world.
Source I am from Austria. :)
Allies are only ever allies of convenience.
The US was allied with both the USSR and China for the sake of convenience. Right after that war the US allied with its erstwhile enemies, Japan, Germany and Italy for the sake of convenience. The Marshal Islands maintain diplomatic relations with both China and the US for their own convenience.
BRIC (South Africa joined later) was initially coined as a description of quickly emerging economies by a Goldman Sachs economist. Since then it’s become an actual trading block that coordinates on economic policy. It’s very obviously dominated by China but the other members see advantage in joining a club that’s not obviously dominated by the US.
The combined GDP of BRICS nations now exceeds the combined GDP of the G20. If it’s a joke, it’s a pretty successful one.
Laws constantly need to catch up.
I’m not sure what law would be an improvement though. The courts tend to frown on laws that are directed at specific groups of people so you probably couldn’t have something as specific as, “When a man says YBMC to a woman she’s allowed to consider it a rape threat and knee him in the nuts.” It also wouldn’t be terribly effective since those people would likely find some variation that skirts the law but carries exactly the same message. That’s so common a tactic we even have a name for it, “dogwhistles”.
The most general form is a “stand your ground” law. Ie we don’t question the motives of the “defender”, we just assume they were right. That has some obvious issues too.
There might be something between those two that would work, but I don’t know what it would be.