PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

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1 yr. ago

Moderating

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Let me turn it around since the opposing claim is that he worked with Republicans to soften the bill. Where did he come out specifically against it? Finding clips of Biden back then is near impossible with all the results that come up from his presidency, and I honestly don’t care enough to keep digging.

Okay so you have literally no idea whether he even ever expressed any specific approval for the part of the bill you're blaming him for being more responsible for than any other US senator. He didn't write it, he didn't make that amendment, and he supported some other parts in debate. But you definitely know he's most responsible. Out of everyone.

Good to know.

I’m just saying that isn’t how most voters make their decisions. It absolutely should be

Correct, which is why the awful quality of our media and the prevalence of propaganda in our discourse should be a much bigger deal than it is considered as. If you and me want to talk about how important that is, instead of shitting on Biden for some random reason when Trump undoes some good thing that he did, we can do that, but you're clearly not into that.

I don't even know what to say about all the rest of this stuff. The point is: Your thing about Biden being "most responsible" even for this very, very loosely connected bit of policy that impacted student loans was a deliberate lie. Whether you were lying, or just repeating some lie that you genuinely believe, is not as important to me anymore. I feel like our interaction here can conclude.

If someone wanted to have a decent career and life, and signed for some student loans not really grasping the implications, and now they're subject to neo-slavery for the bulk of the part of their adult life when they're even trying to get themselves established, that's fucked. Especially since a lot of the time, the promised job security that was supposed to provide the income to pay back the loans hasn't materialized, and a variety of interest and related fuckery have come into the picture to mean that they're on a more or less neverending treadmill of servitude they didn't sign up for.

There are wide varieties of scenarios where a democratic government is supposed to step in and realize that even though "the rules" are being followed, the outcome is horribly unjust, and they fix it. Forgiving student loan payments is one of the obvious ones of those in the modern day. "The rules" is just something we all made up.

Just because it's written down, doesn't make it right.

See “Sec. 220. Nondischargeability of certain educational benefits and loans.” Also, the following is from the Wikipedia entry on BAPCPA.

Got it. Where did he come out specifically in favor of this one specific provision?

President Biden was a huge improvement over Senator Biden, and I give him full credit for that.

Yeah, I'll make sure not to go back in time to 2005 and elect him for anything back then. Back then, I didn't support Democrats either, they were mostly shit with Al Gore as a rare exception. Now they're getting significantly better, and you are casting this massive multi-decade net to try to find little individual things somewhere in the history that you can bring up and make this freakout about, and misrepresent.

Like I say, now that I understand the full scope better, it is impossible for me to see this any other way than just finding random bullshit to throw at Biden.

Well, but you do though. Making comments and getting the respect and agreement of the people in the community is how you get influence.

I really don't like this Lemmy thing where certain people are empowered by the software to control the communications of other people (beyond just removing spam or abuse or something). I feel like you don't need that. I really don't feel like you or me or anybody being put in a position where they can "influence" someone else's communications unilaterally is really necessary to a good community. Often it is counterproductive. Maybe that's the issue, you just activated one of my pet peeves in a way that has nothing to do with what you want to do.

Can you tell me more about what you want to do, how you would want to apply Oxford scoring and such? Maybe that could be a whole separate community / idea, I was envisioning this one as being a lot more basic, just can people talk with each other without blatantly mischaracterizing the other person's points or ignoring questions or etc. But IDK, maybe I just don't understand the basic concept even yet.

Do, or do not. There is no try.

College in the US is largely a big day-care system which interferes with the students' ability to cope with realities of adult life, if they didn't come in with it already, and also a money gate which serves to keep people away from high-paying jobs unless they come from a wealthy family or are willing to enter an indentured servitude relationship.

It has some other subsidiary functions, some of them legitimately important, and education is a wonderful and crucial thing. College in America has been drifting further and further away from education, though, as the society it is forced to exist within has been steadily cared less and less about education with every passing decade.

Yeah, I'd be happy to post it up along with some of the other little tools I use here, that's a good idea.

Nothing is stopping you from making that tool without mod powers...

I generally don't even touch the mod buttons except in exceptional circumstances; I don't expect that this place would be any different. Maybe events will change my mind but I would hope that a lot of this stuff can get worked out with talking and culture, as opposed to by removing comments.

Dude... I think you are literally just making this up (or repeating it from someone who made it up.)

I looked into the 2005 bankruptcy bill which they are arguing about in this clip. I couldn't even find anything in it about student loans. I searched the text, and followed the links to read the article Mother Jones wrote about the issue. Nothing about student loans. The Wikipedia page does have a single sentence claiming that it impacted student loan formulas in some way, with a "citation needed." Where in the text does it do that?

I have found some pages (one, two) that claim that the 2005 bankruptcy reform included making private student loan debt non-dischargeable. So maybe there is something to this argument? Like I said, I couldn't find it in the actual text.

As far as I can tell, deciding whether student loans are dischargeable mostly roots back to a 1987 court case and has to do with having to prove certain elements in bankruptcy court. I don't really know. But regardless, this whole bankruptcy bill had a huge impact on a wide variety of stuff, Biden didn't create it or sponsor it. It does look like he went to bat for it, which was probably bad, but the student loan stuff was a tiny part if it even existed in the bill at all. (Which, maybe it did, I reached my limit for wanting to look into this.) And saying that he was "the Senator" who was most responsible for this thing is just weird, even if he supported it. Presumably, a lot of people supported it, including the authors of the legislation.

Also, micro-focusing on just whether student loan debt is dischargeable in bankruptcy, and saying that is the issue that is competitive with the issue of forgiving loans for the vast majority of people who are paying them who are not bankrupt, is super weird.

Also, you know what Biden is responsible for? In 2022, the DOJ released new guidance indicating that they would not oppose in bankruptcy court anyone who wanted it discharged and could prove that it would be a hardship otherwise.

I have reached a firm conclusion that you are twisting facts around to bad-mouth Biden on this issue.

Ooh... that's a good point. Any discussion which gets fed into the debate bot will get fed into OpenAI's API, which means it'll be used for training. (I trust their "do not use this data" checkbox not at all.) And I think you're right that having that happen will be a deal-breaker for most people and just a totally different thing than the purpose of the community as stated.

Let me think on that a little more. I won't do anything with the tool until I can look into self-hosting it or something. I think consider it as purely a human community until further discussion, then.

That was his sales pitch, and one that I am totally behind, but those are promises, not a narrative.

No, that was reality. That's what happened. The promises were twice as big, but the reality was still enormous.

"Biden caused inflation to go up" was a narrative, and it sold like Nintendo Switch. "Biden caused wages to go up" is not an equally compelling narrative... why? That is what happened. I mean, I know why that one wasn't a narrative, but the reason has absolutely nothing to do with either reality or the inherent nature of the narrative.

His “big raise” proposal wouldn’t even return rates to where they were before Trump slashed them.

Most working people made way more even after adjusting for inflation after Biden was done than before.

Democrats made a conscious decision to abandon working class Americans in favor of urban professionals. It wasn’t a slow devolution, it was a pivot.

True that. It is the source of most of their troubles today, not only because of the history and people's pattern recognition, but because they're still doing it. And yet, one singular Democrat broke with that, and here you are shitting on him.

Why?

Have I said anything that’s not true?

According to logicbomb, you're misrepresenting Biden's involvement with the student loan bill you're talking about. Was the 2005 bill the one you were talking about? What was in it that you didn't like and how was Biden responsible for that part of it?

Historically, most "reboots," at least of the type I think of when you say that, make things worse. I think the labor movement succeeded because it was:

1. Laser-focused on achieving the goal at hand
2. Concerned with directly applying the existing power of the people towards it

No one was concerned at all about "tearing down" any government or about building up any new structure which was going to "fix" anything. It was dead simple: If you want us to work, pay us what we deserve, otherwise get fucked. Whatever governmental or industrial system wants to stand over that and tell it what to do, honestly doesn't really matter all that much to it at the end of the day. Which I think is how it should be.

Towards the end, the government came around and started supporting the workers which helped lock in the gains, but they were doing all their changes from the bottom up and building up the strength there as opposed to any concern at all with the top part.

For visitors to this thread: I would really recommend that you scroll down a little bit to find the person who was claiming that aktually this is all Biden's fault, and then trying to defend it like it made total sense when people asked WTF they were on about. It is interesting.

I don't think this is really true as long as they're complying with the DMCA. OP can upload stuff, it'll stay up until someone notices and cares enough to send a takedown notice, and then the server host will take it down. In theory OP might be liable if they really wanted to push it, which maybe makes it not the best idea, but I think the server operator is in the clear as long as they take stuff down if it does get requested to.

I mean it is fine if someone wants to input some yelling about our distressing "left" party in power in the hopes that it will make it better. What makes it irritating to me is the dishonesty, with made-up attacks that have resonance and emotional weight but no real accuracy to them, and the total disconnection with any type of strategy that could help anything.

"Uncommitted" movement? Fine. Let's put pressure on the Democrats to be better, in a way that's organized and has some passable chance of saving some lives. Great stuff.

"Genocide Joe" and "I'm sitting out this election and you should too"? Great, you made things worse for the Palestinians. Joe Biden isn't running, and Kamala's opponent just wants to kill them all.

Jon Stewart interviewing AOC about all the horror and corruption in the Democratic party? Great stuff. She's got some good insight and they both clearly care and are alarmed about the bullshit and trying to do something about it. Great stuff.

"Yeah but while we're talking about Reagan, isn't it really Senator Biden's fault and mostly his along that things are bad in America right now?"

It's just a bunch of shit. Always has been. And they never change their mind: The "Democrats are shit" theory is all they want to talk about, and if you discuss them into a corner, they'll just fall back to some kind of generalized nihilism or change to some other assertion about bad things the Democrats did.

There is a theory that it's proper to block these people, to reduce the blood pressure of your Lemmy experience, but in my opinion it is better to call them out on it when they start up with it.

This does not surprise me in the slightest to hear.

The only time Democrats have a narrative is when Republicans do something awful, which requires Republicans to be in power.

Biden's narrative was that we need to have a big raise in corporate taxes, spend almost a trillion dollars finally doing something about climate change, bring domestic manufacturing back to the US and give people working-class jobs again. I sort of suspect that's why the corporate press was so silent about the good things he did, and so aggressive and loud about the various attacks against him (like that inflation was all his fault, things like that that would resonate with the voters). It's practically a built-in reflex to them at this point: They know the Republican will set the economy on fire, but they'll be fine even if some other people won't be, so by simply setting a line that if anyone crosses them, they will tank that person's chances even if they're otherwise doing some good things (and even if doing those things is really necessary for the US to keep functioning) (and even if the alternative is active widespread destruction), they keep teaching the lessons that people in power need to have taught to them. So they can keep control.

You're not wrong in most of your analysis, I don't think. But the Democrats didn't get this way overnight or by accident. It happened on purpose, through natural selection and legalized bribery and threat. And, also, any time they do do something good, someone like you comes along and makes sure to shit all over it and "call balls and strikes" and try to "put it in context" and try to cancel it back out again.

There's a whole other way to respond to blaming Reagan which is "yeah sure but we have a lot of momentum in people who are sick to death of the same bullshit, Bernie and AOC are drawing record crowds and there's not even any kind of election going on that would motivate it, we actually probably have a chance at building a framework to do something about this whole broken system. Certainly Trump trying to gut the country for its fixtures and send everyone to ultra-prison will galvanize some opposition, let's do something with it."

But no. Instead it's just this drumbeat of "whoa whoa whoa if you're talking about Reagan let's shit on Biden instead" "Democrats are shit" "let's get discouraged" "it's all his fault" "no wonder people aren't excited" "neoliberalism" "doesn't have a story" "get sad" "it's all his fault" "remember when he betrayed you?" "most voters aren't policy wonks" in big discouraging paragraphs.

There's always something you can dig up, to do it with. And in the end, isn't demotivating any kind of action or hope or credit for good things, the most important thing?

There is one type of person who looks at a fucked up situation in the world, and things "Who can I talk about who is responsible?" They often pick the biggest, or most recent or relevant target.

There's another type of person who looks at a fucked up situation in the world, and thinks "Can I connect this to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris in some way?"

It really looks a lot to me here like you are doing the second of those things. You're allowed to, sure, just like we're allowed to tell you that it's a weird thing to do.