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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:What is it about online leftists having to reflexively defend terrible governments with bad faith arguments. Apply the same scrutiny you would to the US to china for gods sake. We do, that's why many of us come to the conclusion that China is simply governed better in many regards. There's nothing bad faith about that.
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May 20, 2022 23:18
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I've just skimmed the decision; it's not unhinged, but that's because it's able to hide behind a lot of standard and rationale language from Biden v. Texas.
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May 20, 2022 23:23
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TheIncredulousHulk posted:Bro you literally said you'd rather live in the US with covid than China without covid That preference doesn't preclude me from also thinking the US could have done better while still maintaining civil liberties. WorkerThread posted:We do, that's why many of us come to the conclusion that China is simply governed better in many regards. There's nothing bad faith about that. Any definition of 'better' that equates to a government ignoring the will of the governed and ruling via force and removal of dissent is by my standards not better. It's a pretty fundamental disconnect.
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May 20, 2022 23:32
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:That preference doesn't preclude me from also thinking the US could have done better while still maintaining civil liberties. "Civil liberties" don't include recklessly endangering the lives of everyone around you.
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May 20, 2022 23:34
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Any definition of 'better' that equates to a government ignoring the will of the governed is by my standards not better. It's a pretty fundamental disconnect. I consider myself to be kind of slow and not very bright but you're making this extremely easy for me. Time to do a quick google search on the popularity of various policy positions in America vs. the legislative support for them...
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May 20, 2022 23:34
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Not if you look at their excess deaths it wasn't. If you want a positive example of zero covid policy you can at least point to new Zealand instead of China. Do you have a source on the excess deaths in China?
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May 20, 2022 23:35
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Like... when you write something to post, do you take even 1 millisecond to consider "hmm does this attack actually apply even more strongly to the thing I'm trying to defend"?
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May 20, 2022 23:36
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:That preference doesn't preclude me from also thinking the US could have done better while still maintaining civil liberties. Uhh great? I wish everyone had jetpacks and golden toilets but that would not significantly modify the statement that I'd prefer continued participation in consumer culture at the expense of sacrificing a million of my neighbors than living in a country where(in your hypothetical) zero people died from it if I had said that, which you did say Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Any definition of 'better' that equates to a government ignoring the will of the governed and ruling via force and removal of dissent is by my standards not better. It's a pretty fundamental disconnect. lol uhh are you really trying to say the US government is subject to the will of the governed and doesn't rule via force
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May 20, 2022 23:43
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Accidentally backed into Donald Trump was the will of the people.
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May 20, 2022 23:48
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theCalamity posted:Do you have a source on the excess deaths in China? he referred to a piece in the Economist, which will be EXTREMELY funny if it's the one I'm thinking of they put out a truly astonishing piece of hack work a while back extrapolating out The Real Excess Deaths Nobody Will Talk About; when discussing their methodology they reveal that their figure for excess deaths in China is based on assuming the entirety of China has been experiencing the excess death rate of Wuhan in February 2020 for 18 months. when wandering south into India, suddenly they realize that data for precisely one city (they could only get data on Mumbai) is not enough to base your math on, and so they perform an entire world of arcane methodological tricks to try to bring that number down from Mumbai's staggeringly high totals, but when it came to China, well, nobody is reading the Economist to hear that government action to preserve human life is possible, let alone desirable.
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May 20, 2022 23:50
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Gumball Gumption posted:A small right wing minority have the deck stacked in their favor and controlled the government without winning the popular vote and then used that control to allow millions to die during covid under a gently caress you got mine ethos while also using the unrest to attack and kill leftists and others protesting for equal rights. They also ran concentration camps during a pandemic which lead to a lot of deaths. You mean the ones who were voted out of office? quote:It's pretty authoritarian in my opinion Unfortunately for your argument, words mean things. quote:the larger difference between the US and China isn't authoritarianism, it's that one group of authoritarians are using their power to build a functional state that they ruthlessly control while the US authoritarians are using their power to dismantle the federal state and consolidate into smaller governments that they then ruthlessly control. That lack of regulations isn't freedom, it's intentional dismantling of the federal government so that state governments can be more authoritarian without interference. Dismantling the state into a confederation of smaller states is the polar opposite of authoritarianism.
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May 20, 2022 23:53
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Kalit posted:Something like "you can't have a mask mandate" (or whatever examples you're thinking of) is different than "you can't pass laws". Of course the higher levels of government will sometime restrict what lower levels of government can do. But unless AZ has restricted Phoenix from doing nearly anything (which is subjective, I know), that is not what I meant. Iowa City can’t , got a better example?
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May 20, 2022 23:55
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Gumball Gumption posted:So are red states not authoritarian governments? Are Republicans not authoritarians? They're definitely not true libertarians since their arguments about personal freedom are really just trying to explain why rich whites shouldn't be bound by law. You're moving the goalposts from "the US is authoritarian" to "it has authoritarian political parties".
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May 20, 2022 23:58
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Xombie posted:You mean the ones who were voted out of office? I've got some bad news for you about the Democrats.
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May 21, 2022 00:02
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POWELL CURES KIDS posted:I've got some bad news for you about the Democrats. You're going to argue that the US Democratic Party weilds executive control with unilateral abandon? The Democrats who have every policy goal snuffed out by Joe Manchin. The Democrats can't even pass their own president's legislation through the House and Senate that they control, and you're going to say they're authoritarian. Xombie fucked around with this message at 00:38 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 00:16
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Willa Rogers posted:Trump actually did tout the vaccine (and bragged about his speedrun), while he was still in office. The anti-vaccine stuff didn't start till Biden was in charge, just like prominent Dems like Harris were skeptical about the "Trump vaccine" while he was still president. Cognitive dissonance is a helluva drug, I guess. He got vaccinated in secret, while in office. He definitely tried, and still does occasionally, to take credit, but "take credit" isn't what I was describing. I think as a baseline, Republicans were always going to be against the vaccine, but I think there was an opportunity for a right wing populist to wrap it in the flag and make it popular. But that would've required more leadership than he is capable of.
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May 21, 2022 00:23
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Xombie posted:You're going to argue that the US Democratic Party weilds executive control with unilateral abandon? I was actually going to argue against that first point, and observe that your second point--while an oversimplification, and one that somehow still gives the Democrats too much credit--only reinforces the salient argument, namely that the system is designed by and operated for the benefit of a select group of right-wing capitalist ghouls, who have continued to enact their agenda with remarkable success despite being "voted out of office" in our putative democracy. Also worth observing that, as Gumball Gumption noted regarding the Republicans, the Democrats have continued to operate the concentration camps while conspicuously failing to address the COVID pandemic in any meaningful way. In fact, it's almost as if...their actual policy agenda wasn't...truly that different than the Republicans' after all... 
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May 21, 2022 00:43
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Xombie posted:You're moving the goalposts from "the US is authoritarian" to "it has authoritarian political parties". The US is authoritarian. This has remained true under Biden as it did under Trump, and before that, Obama. As has been mentioned, we are the worst carceral state in the world. We have the most prisoners, per-capita and in total number, meaning that we have more prisoners than China with a fraction of the population. Around 15% of black males have seen the inside of a prison. This prison population is now used as effective slave labor, paid only pocket change. This is, of course, explicitly legal in the Constitution. We do not have free speech. Look what happens to BLM demonstrators. They get beaten, tear-gassed, imprisoned on trumped-up charges, etc., and do not enjoy the protection of the law from fascists in trucks who run them over. A number of activists have also been murdered in what are credibly police assassinations. See also people who run afoul of the security establishment, or the lawyer who was jailed and then put under house-arrest for his work exposing the oil industry's support of violence against indigenous populations in S. America. We imprison small children in concentration camps, denying them basic needs. This is getting worse, not better. I'm not interested in getting into a dick-waving contest over which countries suck worse, but the US is indeed an authoritarian shithole. Like every authoritarian system, the repression is distributed highly unequally. Most people ITT are not the underclass or otherwise in the system's crosshairs. cat botherer fucked around with this message at 00:52 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 00:46
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I shouldn't be surprised, but... https://twitter.com/DougJBalloon/status/1527750078374584320?s=20&t=oRCVTzZOCkTLhxPASOw3Hw Andrew Sullivan continues to be a giant shithead
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May 21, 2022 00:54
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Kalli posted:There's one way Hillary could've massively juiced face masks / vaccine numbers Hillary, Obama or Biden could have gotten every citizen in red states vaccinated by simply telling them not to take it or denying it to them by saying it doesn't help and there's only enough of them for New York and California
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May 21, 2022 01:06
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The Democrats and the Republicans are less opposing political parties than distinct factions within the same kleptocratic regime. They're a unified political class with no actual ideological content, beyond protecting and enabling the wealthy donors that sustain them. The only daylight between them seems to be what tactics they use to pursue that goal. In a democracy, you'd think "should we have concentration camps" would be an issue with more than one side--and yet. Any comparison between the policies the American public consistently says it wants and the policies it actually gets reveals that we are, if truly a democracy, not particularly good at being one. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 21, 2022 01:10
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BiggerBoat posted:Hillary, Obama or Biden could have gotten every citizen in red states vaccinated by simply telling them not to take it or denying it to them by saying it doesn't help and there's only enough of them for New York and California It didn't work when Kamala Harris stated she wouldn't take the vaccine if Trump endorsed it. All she had to say was "Yes, I'd take a vaccine if it was certified by the appropriate experts." She shouldn't have added the dig about Trump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKGikIR1a-U
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May 21, 2022 01:10
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cat botherer posted:A number of activists have also been murdered in what are credibly police assassinations. You remember the one time all those Ferguson activists ended up becoming mysteriously dead? I remember that. I don't remember voting for it, though.
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May 21, 2022 01:15
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POWELL CURES KIDS posted:You remember the one time all those Ferguson activists ended up becoming mysteriously dead? I remember that. I don't remember voting for it, though. Vote!
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May 21, 2022 01:18
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cat botherer posted:Yeah it turns out voting doesn't matter when it comes to serious repression. Biden has the power to close the baby jails whenever he wants. as far as I can tell, Biden has significantly improved the handling of unaccompanied children, at least as of December (which also saw a big uptick in average time in ORR custody, which is bad) the number housed in what could plausibly be called 'baby jails' is way down and afaict that's not just a function of shuffling around facilities to different categories he also can't have ORR stop housing kids, they're legally obligated to 1) do something resembling due diligence on placing the kids and 2) ensure their conditions are as non-terrible as possible in the meantime. Adults can be released entirely on their own recognizance, unaccompanied minors can't, so the remedy is to expedite their processing and make their temporary shelters decent.
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May 21, 2022 01:26
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GreyjoyBastard posted:as far as I can tell, Biden has significantly improved the handling of unaccompanied children, at least as of December (which also saw a big uptick in average time in ORR custody, which is bad) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 21, 2022 01:31
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cat botherer posted:That's great to hear that the jails are so much nicer under Biden! So glad Trump's gone. Ok, so when CBP picks up an unaccompanied child at the border, what do you think should happen? The children have to be housed somewhere while a determination is made on what to do with them. This is from the April, 2022 CBP summary: Unaccompanied Children Encounters of unaccompanied children decreased 14 percent, with 12,221 encounters in April compared with 14,143 in March. In April, the average number of unaccompanied children in CBP custody was 478 per day, compared with an average of 582 per day in March.
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May 21, 2022 01:41
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PeterCat posted:Ok, so when CBP picks up an unaccompanied child at the border, what do you think should happen?
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May 21, 2022 01:43
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cat botherer posted:I think they should probably not be kept in detention facilities run by ICE. Would you prefer the DoD? What government agency would satisfy you? Keep in mind we're talking 500 kids a day in custody.
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May 21, 2022 01:52
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PeterCat posted:Would you prefer the DoD? Since we don't have one that can help effectively we should stop taking them into custody instead deploy more social services.
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May 21, 2022 01:57
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GreyjoyBastard posted:as far as I can tell, Biden has significantly improved the handling of unaccompanied children, at least as of December (which also saw a big uptick in average time in ORR custody, which is bad) I mean, this feels like a weak argument right out of the gate. quote:the number housed in what could plausibly be called 'baby jails' is way down and afaict that's not just a function of shuffling around facilities to different categories "Our hands are tied" is an incredibly tired routine, and speaking bluntly, it's not loving okay any more. There has been an unbelievable amount of abuse, neglect, and cruelty in these camps that we need to undo--like trying to find the children that have gone missing, for instance, or getting basic medical and psychiatric care to these people before they die, kill themselves, or resort to violence. But none of that is beyond our abilities and our resources to fix, and every day we are not aggressively fixing it is a literal crime against humanity. Are we willing to let these kids have toothpaste yet? Are they warm? Do they have beds to sleep in? Have we stopped gassing them? Because those are our starting points. It is monstrous and unforgivable. Let's not pretend we can't get this poo poo done. The Republicans refuse to support it? I will personally feed Biden his Metamucil while he signs the executive orders. We have the manpower and the money. If the Democrats aren't willing to use it, it's an active decision on their part, and that is inexcusable. Decorum doesn't mean poo poo in the face of this. I know I get hot about this poo poo, and if I'm overly aggressive in how I express that, my bad. But, goddamn...it's concentration camps for children, you know? It's repulsive, and it deserves our outrage. POWELL CURES KIDS fucked around with this message at 02:21 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 02:19
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cat botherer posted:I think they should probably not be kept in detention facilities run by ICE. I've got some good news on who CBP transfers them to, then Bel Shazar posted:Since we don't have one that can help effectively we should stop taking them into custody instead deploy more social services. definitely an important piece of the puzzle, including after they're released to whichever adult ORR and some of the orgs it works with are still having some staffing problems, including for the caseworkers who are integral to getting child placement done faster. This is arguably the most important job at a system level, actually, because the faster they're placed the less facility beds you need and the more you can keep their needs met for that reduced time.
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May 21, 2022 02:20
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POWELL CURES KIDS posted:I was actually going to argue against that first point, and observe that your second point--while an oversimplification, and one that somehow still gives the Democrats too much credit--only reinforces the salient argument, namely that the system is designed by and operated for the benefit of a select group of right-wing capitalist ghouls, who have continued to enact their agenda with remarkable success despite being "voted out of office" in our putative democracy. The fact that only lovely people get elected doesn't constitute "authoritarianism". quote:Also worth observing that, as Gumball Gumption noted regarding the Republicans, the Democrats have continued to operate the concentration camps while conspicuously failing to address the COVID pandemic in any meaningful way. In fact, it's almost as if...their actual policy agenda wasn't...truly that different than the Republicans' after all... Again, lovely, ineffective government doesn't equal authoritarianism. I'll point out to you what I pointed out to Gumball: words mean things.
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May 21, 2022 02:24
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The republicans are revolutionary romantics (the is the larger category that fascism is in). The democrats are not.
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May 21, 2022 02:29
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Might not be a fruitful source of debate and discussion, but the crux seems to be democrats aren't a solution, and we're in fact not afforded a solution by the current systems and status quo. Just in the interest of not being completely at odds with eachother... people are right to be against the democrats and it doesn't make them complicit with Republicans. Boycotts, general strikes, and Be machievellien. Harness people's anger. If we can use the outrage and fury of the masses to unbalance the prevailing equilibrium then that is right, so long as we don't let it turn into racist anti-semetic death squads* *I live in America
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May 21, 2022 02:33
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cat botherer posted:The US is authoritarian. This has remained true under Biden as it did under Trump, and before that, Obama. "More prisoners" doesn't constitute authoritarianism. quote:We do not have free speech. Look what happens to BLM demonstrators. They get beaten, tear-gassed, imprisoned on trumped-up charges, etc., and do not enjoy the protection of the law from fascists in trucks who run them over. . By local police. Then they got fair trials with representation. Meanwhile you, I, and everyone gets to discuss it and talk about it without any fear of repurcussions. That's not authoritarianism. quote:the lawyer who was jailed and then put under house-arrest for his work exposing the oil industry's support of violence against indigenous populations in S. America. This is describing corruption, not authoritarianism. quote:We imprison small children in concentration camps, denying them basic needs. This is getting worse, not better. I'm not interested in getting into a dick-waving contest over which countries suck worse, but the US is indeed an authoritarian shithole. This is cruelty, but not actually authoritarianism because it's foreign nationals, not citizens. quote:Like every authoritarian system, the repression is distributed highly unequally. Most people ITT are not the underclass or otherwise in the system's crosshairs. Having lovely policies about helping the poor just makes the US economically conservative, corrupt, and terrible. That isn't what the word "authoritarianism" means. "Authoritarianism" isn't a word meaning "government policies I don't like", or even "government that I don't think is fair". Xombie fucked around with this message at 02:38 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 02:33
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Xombie posted:By local police. Then they got fair trials with representation lmao my rear end off (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 21, 2022 03:00
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Replying to every post with "that's not what that word means" and taking no effort to define or make an argument yourself is boring. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 21, 2022 03:04
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Xombie posted:"Authoritarianism" isn't a word meaning "government policies I don't like", or even "government that I don't think is fair". I get your point, but it's also not a binary state or a switch that gets suddenly flipped. I hate to tell you, we're not going to stop authoritarianism by nuancing it to death. Acting like authoritarianism is always right around the corner is probably wiser than you think. What we really need are mutual aid networks based around getting people out of red states. We are going to get a lot more people killed if we keep treating "save the entire United States" as the only possible goal. Flying-PCP fucked around with this message at 03:08 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 03:04
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Xombie posted:By local police. One weird trick to not be authoritarian: Launder your oppression through subservient levels of government.
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May 21, 2022 03:08
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