Xhieron @ xhieron @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Are you playing to win though? I ask because Lemmy is absolutely loaded with faux-progressive astroturfing designed with no other end than to demoralize Democrats, progressives, moderates, "centrists", and anyone else who might stand even the most remote possibility of voting for Joe Biden in November. Why should the GOP bother attacking the administration? They have you to do it for them.

Look at this thread. This program was part of Biden's infrastructure package, passed by Democrats at President Biden's urging, to give free or reduced-cost broadband to low-income families, and the Republicans in Congress defunded it because they hope that when their constituents suffer they'll blame Democrats. And would you look at that! Nearly every comment in this thread, including yours, is a criticism of the administration. No shit, the game is rigged, but from here it sure looks like you lot are playing for the other team.

If you think law has too much room for interpretation when we care about it says, what makes you think anything would improve if we instead cared only about what it meant to say?

The spirit of the law is important in American jurisprudence, but there's a reason that no serious legal academic advocates for abandoning black-letter interpretation: a cornerstone of jurisprudence is predictability. In order to be justly bound by the law, a reasonable person must be able to understand its borders. This gives rise to principles in US law concerning vagueness (vague laws are void ab initio) and due process. We can't always ascertain what the "spirit of the law" is, should be, or was intended to be, but we can always ascertain what the law is. Even in common law and case law, standards must be articulated, and the state must give effect to what is actually said, and not what it wishes had been said. Abandoning this principle in order to "close loopholes" is just inviting bad actors who currently exploit oversights to instead wield unbridled power against ordinary people who could never have even anticipated the danger.

That loopholes are left open deliberately is not a failure of legal interpretation. It's a direct consequence of corruption and regulatory capture. Rewriting American jurisprudence won't solve those problems. Hanging oil magnates and cheaply purchased bureaucrats will.

I hate that this is a reality, but I've got to agree with you. Against all odds Joe Biden has proven to be a remarkably effective president under extremely challenging circumstances, and I love the idea of getting four more years of him. Especially with a real majority in Congress, we could at least see the lowest hanging fruit of mainstream Democratic priorities in the next four years. [And progressives who don't think that's good enough may well lose the Republic for their impatience.]

But the truth is Trump and Biden are both more likely than not to die within the next four years. Biden is only three years older than Trump, but Trump is easily three years or more less healthy than Biden. That said, the actuarial tables paint grim pictures for both of them, and that means that voters need to be paying especially close attention to their VP nominees. To the extent Biden-Harris can make Kamala an extension of Joe Biden's campaign priorities, it's a necessity.

To be frank, I can't help but think it's a little unfortunate that Harris is so essential to the ticket, because she has always had a likability problem, and she has some undiscountable baggage. On the other side, conventional wisdom says Haley is the VP pick, but notwithstanding the general oh-for-fuck-sake unpredictability of Trump, a Haley-Harris matchup is moderately scary, but not nearly as threatening as alternatives. If I were advising Trump's campaign, I can't say I'd be a fan of either Stefanik or Carlson, the former because she adds nothing to the campaign and the latter because Trump doesn't want to be upstaged. When I've asked local Republicans who are well-informed, Kristi Noem continues to be mentioned, and I have to admit that as a Democrat, the Noem-Harris matchup is scary. Biden-Harris absolutely needs the VP to be out front, and frankly, if they could manufacture a tie vote in the Senate somehow to get some new footage of her doing the one thing the Constitution actually requires of her (other than outliving the president), they should.

Well, if you're a materialist, he no longer exists in any way, and we can all rejoice for having outlived him.

And if you're religious at all, then perhaps there is some cosmic justice for him, and the scales may someday balance.

Either way he's dead, and while I can't bring myself to celebrate the death of any man, there's no denying the world may well be a better place without him.

Why would that worry you? What action should they take that would make you less worried?

Christ, this asshole.

It's actually Rama, this asshole, apparently.

I love bugs. But only ocean bugs. With butter.

Okay comrade.

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

Joking aside, what should they have done instead? Nothing? Because that's the alternative. Is your position that these families would be better off if they got nothing instead of anything? The Democrats are making a bet here that they can campaign on expanding the child tax credit. Would reasonable, humane Americans prefer they'd gotten more? Of course, but the divided government isn't a hypothetical: it's reality. We have fascists in government because our moron neighbors put them there, so now we have to deal with them. I don't like it either, but the response can't be to throw up our hands, whine, and then lose when the citizens rightly decide the Democrats can't govern. This isn't a choice between sweeping progressive legislation and watered down half-measures. It's a choice between any legislation and nothing.

The fascists aren't an accident. They're on the Hill because Americans put them there, and even if the Democrats sweep the elections in November, there is no scenario in which they do so overwhelmingly well that all the MAGA lunatics are no longer in government. These pricks are here to stay. And worse, they care a lot more about winning than governing, and this bill is a pretty clear demonstration that that fact is absolutely not true of both parties, and it's not even true of the rest of the GOP, corrupt and compromised though it may be.

Most Americans--myself included--would rather have any improvement to the child tax credit than for the Democrats to engage in the same my-way-or-the-highway bullshit posturing of the QOP. We've seen where the moral highroading and stand-on-principle-until-the-axe-falls bullshit has gotten us. How about some actual government for a change?

Always has.

Eat the rich.

This is the best parody I could come up with:

Vivek Ramaswamy is suspending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and has informed his team to go fuck themselves because he got his, an official tells CNN. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the former candidate was spotted in the parking lot of the News Corp. Building offering free handies for any executive who would give him an interview for a cushy political consulting gig.

This story is breaking, but who really gives a shit if it's updated? Ramaswamy was an also-ran when he started, and now he's a has-been. Other possible hyphenated verb compounds include Trump-slurper and woman-hater.

The original article contains 28 words, this summary contains more (and is entirely useless). Saved an arbitrarily large negative percent. I’m not a bot and I’m not open source! I'm just an asshole who hates what these Republican pricks are doing to democracy, and this comment is a parody. Salt grains advised.

Can I? Probably. Will I? No. I'm also frankly a little offended that you're willing to devolve into explicitly racist utility hypotheticals. If that's the tool upon which you need to depend for your argument, I don't think there's anything further to discuss. If you want to debate how many black people are worth one white person, you can have that conversation with someone else. Happy MLK Day.

I didn't "slip" the word always in there. That's the point.

In the past we did not have good methods or even good understanding of what kinds of indicators we should look at or how. The idea of privilege as a concept wasn't even being studied until the late 1980s. So it was reasonable to use less precise predictive measures (like skin color) when looking at data in aggregate in order to remediate prior harm. But we're not talking about anthropology here. We're talking about policies that affect individual living persons, and if we want to know whether those persons experienced disadvantages, we can just ask them. This isn't a matter of "Are you more likely to have suffered x disadvantage if you're black in America?" It's "Did you personally suffer x?" or at the very least "Did one of your ancestors personally suffer x?" If institutions are deciding they don't need to ask that question because they can instead just screen all applicants of a particular skin color instead, they're doing the exact racial stereotyping that we're attempting to correct. That exact kind of screening is how the FHA and lenders prevented black people from owning homes historically: They decided that all black applicants were more likely to have certain bad qualities, and they categorically excluded them. Now, some well-intentioned but misguided liberals (and occasionally racists) are instead deciding that all black applicants have certain good qualities, and they categorically exclude everyone other than them. It shouldn't take a huge logical leap to understand how that's not better.

You're right. All of those things are happening, and they're despicable. The Israeli people should be marching in the streets, and Netanyahu should be tried as a war criminal.

I don't live in Israel. And in any event, we're talking about American domestic policy. The Israel state is an evil institution--like a lot of states--but the US interest in that part of the world means that the US is going to continue to give Israel its full-throated support, and it doesn't really matter which party is in control of the US government. That one party is using that support to attack the other is just political theater, and everyone who studies global politics knows it.

Godwin's maxim notwithstanding, the mention of Hitler and Stalin is actually a decent example: You realize Stalin was the US's ally in World War II, don't you? Sometimes nations don't get to choose desirable company. The US's reasons for supporting Israel may not be noble, but they're rational. More importantly, what's the alternative you'd prefer? The US should carpet bomb Israeli cities? let Russia have the Middle East (e.g., Syria)? or maybe just send a strongly worded letter? There isn't a more humanitarian alternative that doesn't have worse geopolitical consequences.

I agree. How do you identify otherwise advantaged people? Is skin color always a good indicator of privilege?

...

Maybe someone else will tell you. I've said my part.

Your change involves kids in cages, dead immigrants in rivers, American military deployment in American cities, assassinated political opponents, and dead women in American hospitals. I think I prefer Joe Biden.

Just to be clear--I'm not a fan of the ongoing Palestinian genocide. It's reprehensible. But Biden didn't cause that. The US supports the state of Israel for complex geopolitical reasons that aren't that different from why it also supports other regimes that lack stirling human rights records, and those reasons date back nearly a hundred years. That's realpolitik, and you might not like how the diplomatic sausage is made. It's not pretty for the US, and I hate to be the one to break it to you, but it's not pretty for other nations either. But guess what? If Bernie Sanders were president, or if Donald Trump were president, you know what would be different about America's foreign policy position re Israel? Not a goddamned thing. Because this is as good as it gets. It's a calculated diplomatic position. Not pretty, and not fun politically, but every alternative is as morally black or worse, and absolutely worse for US interests.

The US is an empire. It does empire things. Sometimes I don't like those things. But I live here. So yeah, 1000 years sounds nice. Certainly beats trying to kill the whole experiment in less than four. That's what the other guy wants. Personally, I'd rather keep it around to try to do some fixing.

But keep it coming with the hyperbole if it makes you feel righteous.

US bad. Got it.

What alternative would you propose? Say what you will about Sanders, but he actually wants the Republic to last, imperfect though it may be. Apparently many of his critics prefer a politician who will throw a tantrum if things don't go his way and then try to bring down the whole nation. That reminds me of someone else.

It's a lot more complicated than that. The people pursuing these lawsuits are opportunists, to be sure, and may well be racists, but "Those who oppose affirmative action are racists" is far too broad a net. Targeting anything, whether a college application, job, housing, or grant, based on race and ethnicity as a sole or principal criterion--whether the outcome or intent is good or bad--is a problematic undertaking, and these lawsuits demonstrate why: If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. If a white person is disadvantaged in a program or process because they're white, that's a problem.

We have better criteria. People who are actually advancing the cause of DEI are going to use this as an opportunity to articulate what the real issues are, and they absolutely should: you shouldn't get a grant for being black. You should get a grant for serving a historically disadvantaged community. Maybe that community is black--but maybe it's LGBTQ, or Hispanic American, or even just poor. You shouldn't need to target race, because if race is actually an indicator of qualification, you can just target the qualification and get the same pool of beneficiaries. If there is no underlying qualification? Well then maybe the grant is racist.

All of that said, on the actual merits here, I'm inclined to agree that a grant is qualitatively different than an employment or enrollment agreement. You should be able to give your money to whomever you want for any reason or no reason. Nevertheless, the broader issue of DEI isn't just a matter of racists vs minority groups. It necessarily demands a confrontation of why it matters that black entrepreneurs, for example, might need redress for harm that their ancestors--real people--suffered at the hands of an inequitable and unjust state. We can talk about that without racist language and policy, and we must.