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2 yr. ago

  • There sort of is now but most people don't know about it yet. Instead of 911, dial 988. I don't think 988 sends people to you, but they are trained mental health specialists who can talk instead of shout and threaten violence.

    Read more here: https://988lifeline.org/

  • I think the point is that we have appropriately trained crisis response professionals, and those people should not be law enforcement. Cops have their role, and it is enforcing the law. They are not not should they be tasked with becoming mental health professionals.

    I don't want cops showing up when I really need an ambulance.

  • You make a valid point, but the reason people are undecided is that they they have no properly informed opinions. I hate this narrative that Biden is ineffective. Biden has done a lot of good things. And where congress failed, he found a way to get shit done anyway. People don't know that because media sucks and their echo chambers don't tell them. Or alternatively, their expectation about what a president can do in one term is completely unreasonable.

    And that is all while ignoring that a republican congress will hold back the entire country for years just to make sure their guy looks better. And it works! People complain about shit not getting done but couldn't tell you how their representatives voted on those things.

    So yeah, pretty much what you said. They think the candidates are roughly the same, but they have no clue how what their candidates do actually affects them.

  • What are your expectations? Biden has implemented far more policy than he gets credit for. He can't fix everything all at once. It has taken us decades to get where we are, one presidential term is not going to be enough to right the ship.

    We all have to work within the framework as it exists today - even the president. He has some challenging lines to walk just to get seemingly simple things done.

    So what policies do you want? And in what ways have Biden's progress been unacceptable to you? In what ways have they been acceptable? Given the current landscape, what do you realistically think he could or should do differently?

  • I'm sorry, I must be misunderstanding you. You aren't asserting that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Gaza started within the last 12 months, are you?

    Because if you are, then I strongly encourage you to look a little bit deeper into this whole thing. It's been going on for decades.

  • This is completely tone deaf to the things that Biden HAS been able to accomplish. I'd encourage you to research his presidency before you accept and parrot all of the bad things you hear.

    To name just a few:

    • Unprecedented student loan debt relief
    • Improvements to Medicare including the ability to negotiate drug prices and capping prices of certain medications like insulin
    • Extremely low unemployment, just a few short years after the pandemic
    • Pardoning of minor federal marijuana convictions and initiated the process of having marijuana rescheduled
    • A push to make birth control pills available OTC without a prescription in the wake of conservative attacks on reproductive health rights
    • Renewed focus on infrastructure spending
    • Policies friendly to green energy

    And that's not mentioning the things that could have happened were it not for constant obstruction of Republicans - specifically, efforts to better protect our borders and efforts to curb gun violence.

    The president is not a king or autocrat no matter how much Trump and Republicans might disagree. His policy decisions must be focused in order to make any progress at all. He can't simply wave his hand and make everything a magical utopia.

    So before you continue complaining about the lack of progress, I implore you: take ten minutes to do some Google searches about the things that are important to you and the reasons why more progress is not being made. You might be surprised at weary you learn.

    It is critically important that we do not give up ground and backslide because the conservative media machine is so powerful that it makes it seem like nothing good has happened.

  • There's also the fact that there were no warnings. I've read some potentially conflicting accounts, but the consensus seems to be that there were no warning pamphlets dropped on Hiroshima ahead of the nuclear blast. At best, there may have been leaflets dropped that included Hiroshima amongst a list of 35 Japanese cities that could be the target of a bombing. At that time, the level of destructive capabilities were unheard of, so even seeing those leaflets, the thoughts citizens may have had is that there would be some firebombing. Destruction and death could be expected, but nothing like the complete obliteration that actually happened.

    The use of atomic weapons was a demonstration of US destructive capabilities. They were a warning built of indiscriminate evil that saught only to strike fear into the eyes of anyone who would dare attack the US.

    The use of atomic weapons may have legitimately reduced the number of American casualties, but I'm with you. It's impossible to know whether lives were saved beyond those of American soldiers. Many civilians perished on those days, and that is not something to be celebrated.

    https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/warning-leaflets/

  • From what I've heard since then, there was some vandalism / breaking and entering going on. I haven't heard about any violence directed at people, but if they're breaking into buildings, it is reasonable to stop them. If they were all just peacefully (meaning non-violent, not necessarily quiet) camped out on the quad, then I would say the govt had do right to remove them.

  • No, that's not what I'm saying at all. The situation is that you will realistically have two choices for president. Voting for anything other than one of those two choices is effectively pointless as it will have no impact on the outcome except to withhold a vote from one of the two candidates that are going to win.

    Anything else that you choose is symbolic at best but effectively meaningless.

  • Well yeah, but that's a pretty broad spectrum. Giving up by not participating at all is a higher degree of apathy than "giving up" by realistically evaluating your situation and recognizing that participating in a deeply flawed system will still have a chance of moving the needle in the direction you want it to go, or at least stopping it from moving the other direction.

  • Even though you preemptively asked people not to provide a counterpoint, I feel the need to highlight a problem with your analogy that you seen to already be aware of.

    Your position of "I don't want to go camping anymore" is a fantasy. The only way to achieve that is to emigrate to another country. The real situation is: you're going to sleep outside. Do you want a leaky tent or a ragged old tarp? Those are your only two choices. If you do not make a choice, then you are leaving the choice up to everyone else.

    If you're okay with that, then sobeit. It is your right to opt out of participating in the political process, but that doesn't change which tent you're going to end up sleeping in. If you're an American, you're along for the ride whether you like it or not. Your choice to opt out does not change the outcome, it merely cedes control to everyone else.

    I tend to agree with your main point though. I'm pretty exhausted with everyone around me selecting the same deteriorated tents that we've been using for the last 50 years because "that's the only way enough people will select it over the moldy tarp" instead of considering a new one that actually works, or at least has fewer leaks.