https://archive.is/2024.08.10-112355/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/10/opinion/kamala-harris-gaza-detroit.html

While I wouldn’t mind a president saying “lets have the interest rates be a bit lower” I really don’t want one man to have that much more power.

This is why I did a “walkthrough test” when I had to write documentation on this sort of thing. I’m a terrible technical writer, so this shit is necessary for me.

I grabbed my friend who knows enough about computers to attempt this, but not enough about infrastructure to automatically know what I meant when I was too vague.

Took two revisions, but the final document was way easier to follow at the end

I’m glad things are going well for you, and I don’t mean this in any sarcastic way or anything.

Because my personal situation has been so good, should I assume that this is true for everyone in our country? Or should I be smart and recognize my personal experience is anecdotal and not representative of the whole economy? Should I blame the media too for reporting what’s actually happening?

I get my personal experience isn’t the average. I also get that, while a better representation, knowing the experiences that my friends and family are having isn’t the average.

My problem isn’t my experiences not matching the average. My issue is the metrics used by media are not a representation of average, and the pain of seeing these metrics show things are supposedly getting better where so many things around me are getting worse, at times in order to improve the metrics used by the media.

My issues are twofold:

I don’t think the metrics used by the media, ie the stock market, are wholly representative of whether or not things are going good for the average American. When things plummet, sure, I’d agree that’s a good metric, since companies will panic and then people will get screwed. But I don’t think markets doing well means things are doing well for the average American.

Sure, the line might be going up, that’s good for some people, but there are many reasons why that could be happening that have no impact, or even a negative impact on the average person. For example, a new technology could have been discovered that lets workers do double the work. A company that fires half their staff will now be making more profit, since they are paying less in wages, and therefore their stock values will rise. Half of their employees were sacrificed on the altar of the stock market for those gains. To use a more recent and frequent example of something that fucked me over: tech layoffs. Tech companies will often purge a lot of employees when doing things like preparing for an acquisition, or immediately following one. Sometimes, they will just thin out their staff following a completed project, or something similar. This often has a positive impact on stocks, but a dire impact on workers.

I also have an issue with the partisanship of the media and how the economy is presented to us differently based on who is in power and the bias of those, but that’s a whole new can of worms.

Yeah, I know. Unemployment is a fucked metric, especially if you have the misfortune to have student loans, a shit job, and live in an expensive area, you’re quite simply fucked.

I’m well aware that the us government sucks since I live under it.

But saying “that’s just how it works” is a thought terminating cliche.

I genuinely don’t get how “Trump would have been forced to do the same though” even works as an excuse.

Wouldn’t it be better off if biden risked his career to actually try and prevent the genocide from continuing? Wouldn’t it be better if he even took a small risk to try and actually prevent Netanyahu from crossing one of his many lines? Wouldn’t it be better if we learned from our mistakes in WWII and instead of appeasing the fascists, we did something about fascism? Netanyahu will not be pleased with only Gaza.

To paint it as a necessity, ie “trump would have been forced to do the same,” is genuinely disgusting. This removes all agency the person in power had when they made the decisions that led up to this, and it removes the agency they have to fix this. To say the “most powerful man in the world” was forced to aid and abet a genocide is such a bullshit argument and I really wish people would just realize that.

I think it’s the worst kind of pragmatism to consider it a necessity of geopolitics to just casually cleanse a people. That sort of thing is how you make the evils of this world palatable for people on the news.

Congratulations! You are employed, even if you are only working half the normal hours to get a luxurious starvation wage!

I hope you are proud to be a golden star on this country’s incredible employment statistics! Uncle Sam loves ya for it!

Well, you are absolutely right that it doesn’t make it better lol. It’s like that “Well, it could be worse” thing people say. The people doing very well during the depression were doing so at the expense of everyone else. I wouldn’t say it’s a good thing for a parasite to be engorged on its host.

I just hate how the media acts like everything is peachy and good as I see another mass layoff knowing my contract won’t be renewed. While I get that this is not at all representative, I did see a big industry fire so many people after record profits.

Where I live, I’ve been seeing a lot of people struggling to get groceries and shit while the market boomed, as supermarkets made record profits. I applied to many hundreds of jobs during a hiring shortage, and I have a few friends who applied to more.

I get these metrics aren’t supposed to represent me, but they do not represent the world around me either. If not that, then who is it supposed to represent?

And to be told that “Bidenomics is good for the economy” might be factual based on these metrics, but to see all those good lines go up and bad lines go down and see everyone around me struggle is super fucking dissonant, and to get that level of gaslighting is a bit insulting.

The economy is complete bullshit and isn’t a metric of the average either.

Wait there was full employment? That wasn’t my experience over the 10 months I was unemployed. It wasn’t my experience watching the mass layoffs in my field.

I feel like I have been gaslit by the news saying the economy is up and unemployment is down and all I can see around me is the contrary. The past year was infuriating

Is being a cop an unchanging characteristic that you’re born with?

Can someone choose to just change their ethnicity on a whim?

Well, I’d say holding a specific occupation that has harmful effects on the people around you and choosing to maintain it makes you a bastard, since you can just stop being a cop, and therefore stop being a problem. People aren’t born being a cop. They choose to become one. And that choice makes them a damn rotten bastard.

I don’t think any data was lost in girlfreddy’s thought process, I think you disagreed and tried to form a logical line of thought to disprove theirs while sounding smart, and ended up making some false equivalences and oversimplifications in the process

In short, acab

Well, microsoft chooses bing for you sometimes

You don’t need to be downtrodden to feel like a party is failing you. Considering life is getting harder for so many lower and middle class people, a lot of people are feeling worse than they did 10-15 years ago. This is where people have been failed by both parties.

I mentioned that there are people who are feeling like they are losing their position in society. Some people are simply bigoted and are upset at seeing minorities get visibility, some are upset that christianity is less prevalent among Americans. I don’t think either of these reasons is valid, though, fuck the old hierarchies.

The issues faced by Americans in the rural south are completely different than the ones faced by Americans on the east or west coasts. We basically live in separate worlds. Republicans failed them, but to think the democrats didn’t is silly. For example, a lot of people live in rural areas, where the police would take an hour to get there if someone was being attacked by someone or some animal. Guns are a bit more necessary in places like this than they are in a big city.

Granted, I think the media’s lies is the biggest cause of the populism. And holy shit does right wing media spew lies at an incredible rate.

That’s true. I was just trying to explain my view of the US system.

Broadly speaking, do think that if a country has two dominant neoliberal parties, like the US, this will inevitably happen.

In a two party system, populist movements grow when the opposition party is failing (or is perceived as failing) people. Alternatively, both parties can fail the people before one becomes populist.

The two party system has failed Americans. But now that the republicans have created a populist movement, the failure of democrats to properly serve many people causes them to be pulled by populism. It doesn’t help that the culture war lets absolue horseshit issues fly by without actual basis in reality, since that fuels the fire without actually having to do the hard discussions about policy.

The MAGA movement is a “third way” that formed because the paths forward shown by both democrats and republicans seemed to lead to nowhere for many people.

I don’t think this is a cancer, I think this is a horrendous feature of the design of a representative democracy under capitalism (at least, in the American sense)

Capitalism will crush people while trying to wring every bit of profit out of them, and in a capitalist democracy, the state supports capitalism.

Representative democracy leads to unaccountable representatives. They still need to get re-elected if they want to (or they could just serve capital and dip), but with all the dogmatism caused by political parties, the hierarchy of the parties protecting the politician, and the benefits of having corporate sugar daddies, especially media corporations, they can get away with enriching themselves at the expense of Americans, while still having decent odds at reelection.

Further, people in power, for whatever reason gave this tendency to build their power, usually at the expense of those without it. The state gives itself new powers and new toys at the expense of everyone else. Fear of terrorism gave us some of the most draconian laws on the books, such as the patriot act, which has not been repealed whenever there has been an opportunity to. The police got afraid of the people, and bought themselves guns, counterinsurgency training and tools from a foreign apartheid state, armored cars, and raises. The supreme court went from writing itself into existence to giving the president near legal immunity, rolling out the red carpet for the authoritarian state to become an even more authoritarian state.

When you mix these tendencies together, its no wonder why this state has failed. And while it hasn’t failed everyone, the nature of capitalism leads to a pretty large exploited class ripe for exploitation. And this populist movement is ready to take advantage of that, between those primed by culture war drivel, economic suffering, or seeing their demographic and/or class lose power in some way.

This populism isn’t a cancer on an ailing democracy.

It is a symptom of a failing democracy, unable to sustain itself from the structure of itself.

I love paul klee, and I’m surprised to see his work here.

Thanks!

It does make me a little uncomfortable to see intimate displays of affection in public. It doesn’t matter if it’s straight or gay or whatever.

I have gotten comfortable with the discomfort… it’s not their problem to deal with, it’s mine.

100%

As my views matured, I’ve grown to realize that forcing people to comply with the comfort of people is inherently oppressive, and that when I’m in public, I’m not entitled to complete comfort.

I’m not a big fan of straight people holding hands or kissing in public. Like, i support people doing things like that in the privacy of their home, but they don’t need to force themselves upon is and shove their straightness down our throats. Essentially, I don’t think straight people should be able to openly exist in public, since their existence is forcing it down our throats, so they should just go back into the closet.

:::/s:::

Dominos is outrageously expensive if you don’t shop the deals.

When I was in college, I’d get dominos with my roommates when they had the 20$ special, which would be about 30$ after tip and delivery. The special had 2 medium pizzas, garlic knots, cinnamon twists, and soda.

After I moved back home, I learned my local dominos doesn’t always have that deal. I’d get something similar to what you got and I’d be upset that I got less food for a bit more…

Now what really pisses me off is the high end neopolitan place near me is cheaper on their dinner special days, where you can get 2 personal pizzas that taste so good I’d accept it as proof that god is real for about 25$ including tips and gas money.

I thought about it and realized that you missed the point of what I’m saying.

I’m arguing that the only way you can view them (both biden and FDR) as someone who did more good than harm is if you abstract the harms and goods from the perspective of someone who is not being harmed while being a person who is benefited.

FDR sentenced a single ethnicity to prison for the crime of being japanese. This destroyed generational wealth, and ruined the upward mobility of a generation. It’s easier to say “he did more good than harm” if you are both the one being harmed.

Biden is not just allowing genocide, but funding it, and attacking those who prevent it from continuing. If you are isolated from the suffering he is causing, it’s super easy to say he is doing more good than harm.

Sure, there are parallels that can be drawn, but that’s not what I’m arguing against. To say I’m proving this point would be true, but completely dishonest since it blatantly ignores the argument I made against that point you madr in the edit.