He can cease arms shipments to Israel, but not without losing the election by angering the Jewish voters

This is a good point I shockingly hadn’t thought about until now, but, true, biden could stop sending weapons, and then harris could decide to still stand as though she supports israel in order to minimize any viable hit to her polls, since he’s the one in power but he’s not actually running for re-election. But also, what jewish voters? What, single issue, jewish voters, exist in a valuable swing state, that aren’t already voting for republicans? You could maybe put up nevada or arizona, where they make up 2.6% and 1.7% of the state’s population, but you have to weight that against michigan, where muslim voters make up 2.4% of the population. I think wisconsin also has a larger percentage of muslim voters than jewish voters, as well. I’ve also seen a couple polls that suggest that jews have about as favorable a view of israel as the average american, I’m not even really sure that they’re a specific demographic to point out. Orthodox and conservative jews, maybe. There’s another handful of calculations you can make there, but that also doesn’t really factor in that by far the largest cohort which is going to be voters on supporting israel is probably evangelical christians, which are also obviously going to be a huge piece of the republican base, and that’s not something you’re going to strip away by outflanking them, like democrats are currently also trying to do with the border. The main democratic base, though, is going to be a myriad of different people, since they tend to be more popular overall, more popular in ethnically diverse cities, whatever, and it’s definitely going to be very alienating to the base to decide to keep pumping weapons into israel, take a harder stance on the border, and provide no real tangible economic policy to improve people’s lives.

Not to mention, none of these electioneering calculations, over less than 3% of the population, in very particular states, really means that it’s a good decision ethically, economically, geopolitically, to not pull back on the reigns of the rabid dog we’ve had plopped down in the middle east. Mostly to protect an insanely stupid global trade port that we’re using to help ship chinese goods to europe, and maybe also using to train a couple cops we can deploy to shoot fare evaders and also like 3 other people. Everyone loves to play at an election journalist and say, ah, well, this just a strategic move that exists for some other theoretical person that exists, it’s not really for me. They never actually defend the policy on it’s own merits. Then, consistently ignore the same thing happening, repetitively, for like 30 years, since that electioneering shit was really coined as a strategic rhetorical move afaik. The country shifting rightward, that’s not just some sort of like, crazy coincidence, and it’s not something that’s due to random chance events that happened to screw the democrats over and force them to consistently slide to the right for the last, well, last 80 years, at this point. It’s because the like 30% of hardline voters are willing to parrot the same swill they’re given, and are totally willing to slide as right as is necessary and follow the dems off a cliff, it’s because the american population at large is captured by a huge corporate propaganda apparatus that the democrats are not willing to do anything about, it’s because the american population is swamped by a nosedive in standards of living and a shrinking middle class and are looking for an easy scapegoat. At any point, dems could’ve pointed out that illegal immigrants are, in total, fucking 3% of the population. They don’t, because they don’t really care, because it’s the institutional security stance that we should be more xenophobic to shore up against climate refugees.

Me? I’m not a swing state voter, so I’m just gonna vote for whichever third party candidate is a valid write-in and also maybe seems like they’ll get enough to get federal funding, if that exists, and otherwise I’ll just vote for claudia de la cruz.

If the economy were operating under rationality it would probably stop feeding elderly people as they can’t do any work and don’t provide much in the way of productivity, for example.

See, so that’s like, I dunno if that’s so much a problem. First off, rationality is sort of just a method that you’re using to affect some type of process, in this case, economic efficiency Under which it probably also wouldn’t make sense to, say, just throw old people off of big towers or whatever type of thing. People would probably overthrow your system, you’d deal with a high level of instability, and being unable to track people’s ages effectively, which seems pretty inefficient, people might also try to move, or leave your system as they get older. So I’d expect some level of brain drain there, which leads to another point: You’re also decreasing any worker productivity you would gain from old joe who ran the lumber yard still being around, so you can ask him questions about the quirks of the lumber yard. Maybe old joe even just boosts worker productivity by the fact that he makes his family and friends happier, and more able to tolerate bad working conditions, longer work hours, or more desirable than that, maybe he gives them the will to learn more, and bring you better higher level jobs where they will be ultimately much more efficient for whatever time they do end up spending on production. But back to rationality, that’s just a method you’re using to evaluate things. In this case, maybe “efficiency”, which is sort of a proxy value for other, more real values. Efficiency to do what? Usually by, economic efficiency, we mean like, we’re minimizing the necessary inputs, to affect some productive capacity, while maximizing the outputs, in like, a material way. But then, maybe the sort of our core value that we’re chasing after should be to maximize the happiness that old joe is capable of giving to his friends and family, or something harder to define and measure, and more along those lines. That, that would maybe be a flaw of socialist systems, that we don’t have some universal definition of a “good” to work towards, but I would say that, again, that’s not a distinct flaw of those systems in particular, and in capitalism, that just gets subsumed by a bunch of other bullshit values. You don’t have a universal definition of good, because you’re always just making short term moves to maximize the profit of your company. Moral miasma, zombification.

Getting even more off topic, I think in general though my main counterargument is just that like. Any risk we take by defining a “good”, right, a good to work towards, I think that’s a good risk to take. To take the risk that, by defining the good, you eliminate other definitions of “good” that could’veexisted, and the freedom to have those other definitions of good. It’s better to take that risk, and define that good, and then work towards it (and mostly, even to point out that such a core value exists, in practice, even acknowledge that it exists, more than anything else.). I think it’s better to do that, than substitute your “good” for “freedom”, which, like efficiency (and even like “good”, but shhh), is just a proxy value for other things. In the market, in capitalism, we define freedom as the ability to own capital, own property, spend money on what you want to spend it on, and work to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 flipping calorically and nutritionally deficient burgers for a bunch of other people who have worked to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 doing equally insane things. We define no “good” in capitalism, we just leave that shit up to the market, and the market already reaches a decision, which is that every little corporation should just replicate authoritarianism in their little removed section of the economy. Every little corporation gets their “good”, and then they fight it out in the marketplace. Ends up that actually, we’ve just blown this up to be even every single individual, because, again, we’ve adopted freedom as our current value. Swim in the water, stop knowing that it’s there. Big shocker when the individuals at the highest level of the market, having passed through many tests to get there, big shocker when their personal definition of “good” is fucked up, short sighted, and when they can’t implement said definition if they even have one, because when they decide to do so, they get curbstomped for engaging in too much long term thinking compared to just sucking up as much of the industry as is possible at the time. I’m also not even saying that a monopoly is bad necessarily, right, as an alternative to this, I’m just saying that it’s hypocritical to the supposed value of capitalism, which should be to use market economics to do these calculations at basically every level (which I’m also not convinced would be more efficient then just doing them somewhere else). It also tends to be bad because it still exists within this context in which all this short term incentive is naturally floating around and in which the highest powers in the land are naturally selected to be bad authoritarians.

But take the ICE, for example. I fucking hate the ICE. Mostly because it has enabled mass market automobiles to become a thing, which has impacted our transportation infrastructure in a very adverse set of ways, with an adverse set of incentives. Suburbanization blows up out of white flight as america, conceived as a sort of colonial experiment in a time of slavery, obviously has a lot of hangups around 18th century conceptions of racial superiority. Then you have the corporate lobbying that affects the political system, on top of the general political system just being tailored for the wealthy from the jump (and being tuned to the wealthy over time), and badda bing badda boom pretty soon you’re ripping out LA’s streetcars to instead flood the streets with massive chunky automobiles that kill a ton of people per year, fill the air with leaded and mostly unregulated particulate emissions, and we’re like a century into that as a system now, so we’re basically locked in, and none of the fundamental problems with cars as a format have been solved, even with EVs, you’re still getting particulate emissions from brakes, lithium mining issues, you’re still getting road wear and expenses from that, you’re still spreading out cities much more than they need to be which massively increases the necessary power consumption by decreasing the r-values of homes by increasing the surface area of homes and increasing the surface area of a home in which a singular person is going to live and increasing the volume of air inside the home per person which is necessary to be heated, and then we have relay stations so we need to spend more money to pump more electricity and water a longer distance and so on and so forth. We can talk about socialism as a distinct set of values as mostly divorced from questions of authoritarianism, because it’s assumed that we’re doing this, in good faith, to decentralize ownership of everything, ownership of the workplace, restoring the ownership of the means of production to the proletariat and all that good shit. We can assume all that to be the case, right, oh, and then since we don’t want market economies to really re-emerge, replicating class dynamics inside of the apparatus of the corporation, we go from having a co-operative to just having the corporation be owned by the public, and then maybe that’s “authoritarian” even if we have a more democratic voting system than a capitalist country is allowed to have. Whatever, those are all good debates to have, those sorts of debates, they’re what socialists are gonna talk about in a sort of abstract sense, and then they’re all gonna draft up lines like, oh, I’m a marxist because of XYZ, whatever. My concern, personally, is sort of like, I look at the market economy, at capitalism, and the supposed “freedom” it provides people, in the market, to make totally dunderheaded, propagandized decisions, that if you look at them in the abstract, make totally no sense whatsoever. My concern is that we currently find ourselves in a system where all of that shit about the ICE exists, and the ICE isn’t just used to power like, a bunch of farm vehicles somewhere, and then everyone else takes the train because if I talk through every other point about car use then obviously none of it makes any sense to any set of values that isn’t “I want to kill people with my car” or “I want to waste a lot of gas” or “I want to intentionally spend a lot of money” or “I want to look cool and feel cool and manly”, type shit. That, is multiplied for like every other facet of the economy, that times a million. I hate that shit, mostly more than anything. That we can come to the correct takeaways and decisions, and then do nothing about it because the system doesn’t care. I don’t care so much how we get there, or even necessarily how authoritarian a given system is, because I think about the most that can be expected from people who have been in a capitalist society is to vote for the replication of said capitalist society with maybe some socialized benefits, democratic socialismo style, and I fully expect that shit to get rolled back in 50 years and also to exploit the third world since obviously people outside the jurisdiction of the state aren’t allowed to vote in the state’s elections. Really all I want is for everyone to just have healthcare, everyone to have good regional transit, for our energy infrastructure to make sense, our food infrastructure to make sense, I want people to stop dying in wars, whatever. The current global system fucking sucks for all that stuff. That’s mostly the only reason why I get pushed towards socialism. Mostly the specifics only exist for me insofar as they affect or not my ability to enforce that idea of “good”, which I think is pretty sensible once it actually gets spelled out into the material.

I feel like if I told you to go and read a book on socialism, and how it functions, and what some theoretical structures for it would be, that would be kind of useless and repetitive, since you’ve probably gotten that before, it’s a pretty popular response. But I think that would probably be the best solution for your confusion here, any given book you decide to pick up or get recommended on the subject will probably be able to inform you better than some random person’s re-translation of the book.

If you have gotten that response before, then I gotta ask, along with everyone else that would’ve gotten that recommendation and then not done so, why you’d still be talking about a topic that you’re not willing to invest like, I dunno, 7-8 total hours in. Probably could’ve read das kapital, and taken notes on it, and then shot those notes at a professor or other talking head online or even just some other random commenter, and then probably been done with it in the amount of time you’ve spent talking about that shit on lemmy. And that’s probably the most dense and fundamental book on the subject if we’re not getting into weird french postmodern bullshit.

Random half-baked schmucks from all walks and different schools of socialism and communism are going to present you with a litany of different explanations as to what the system actually entails, that they’re probably half-remembering and then regurgitating from youtube videos, or whatever random collection of academic works they’ve gone in for. That’s obviously not the best way to learn about the system, or really to learn about anything. Means that you’ll get weirdass definitions like:

to capitalism but if private ownership of capital isn’t a thing anymore.

Which sounds pretty much completely incoherent at its face. I have no conception of what that would look like, because the ownership of capital is a foundational enough belief in capitalism to be what the system is named after. It’s like socialism but without any socialized stuff, or communism without communal ownership.

Like, I’ve never heard of socialism entailing that you buying a product a company sells entitles you to shares in that company. You’re not a worker at said company, that doesn’t really make any sense. You also later on talk about “schizo” capital (?), shit about where money comes from (you can answer this one in capitalism, as well. Also, money =/= capital), and the economic calculation problem, which, I dunno man. I’m not going to say so much that that shit’s made up, but it’s not really a big problem, and it’s also a problem that capitalism still basically has to reckon with at a fundamental level, it just ignores it and then decides to crash every decade or so, so that the market can “prune” itself or whatever bullshit. Go hit the paul removedshott vape pen, or go read the book about walmart or whatever.

Also just like. I dunno, maybe we don’t need 15 brands of peanut butter at the supermarket which are superficially different but fundamentally the same. Maybe we can get away with just having chunky and just having smooth. Maybe the measure of an efficient economic system isn’t that there’s shelves full of a range of insubstantially different products and then also that 30-40% of the food is wasted, maybe there’s a better measure of “efficiency” there. You can’t assume that the decision making choices of people in the market are 100% rational, maybe by assuming that they’re rational we just leave the corporate propaganda apparatus totally unacknowledged, which is exactly where that apparatus likes to be. You can’t assume that there aren’t externalized costs that aren’t factored into the initial price, like how suburbia is subsidized, like how climate change is happening. You can’t assume that there’s no monopolies, which are just going to sit on top of a singular element of the chain, do all the calculations completely internal to themselves, not communicate that with anyone else, and then effectively be a centrally planned authoritarian state for that particular sector of the economy which they and they alone control completely.

Most of all, I think that you can’t assume that the government isn’t totally conscious of all of these flaws, and have decided to ignore them at the behest of corporate donors. The can gets kicked down the street.

I mean, I dunno. It’s been the “future of the internet” since the 90’s, but nobody can solve the fundamental problems with such systems existing in the actual real material world, so we just get hit with an ever dwindling supply of larger and larger social media monopolies. Same as it ever was.

You know you’re also using the internet, right?

I mean I do think banning them is a good idea, and in general I think nazis should be taken on helicopter rides, most especially the enablers of nazis, their financial leash handlers which basically bootstrap them into these positions in order to push the dialogue further rightward in service of corporate interests, and probably also in this case in service of “geopolitical security” since we’re going to be seeing oncoming climate refugees in the coming years, and combatting that in any way but increasing the security apparatus is off the table.

More than that, though, I worry that realistically just banning them, though a great temporary measure, won’t do much, say, five years or a decade down the road, because it’s not gonna solve the core hypocrisies and discrepancies that neoliberalism is not so keen to solve. If you want to actually solve this problem long term then you need to combat those core problems. Instead, though, I think that probably the party being banned will just see them either form a new party, or else tone down their rhetoric to an acceptable degree, or just join the next furthest right party and then decide to push them further right, and so on and so on, until we’ve all collectively just shifted rightward to an incredible degree.

Ad nauseam, et cetera, regardless of the political apparatuses at work, until collectively the western world plummets towards fascism.

Because I’m sure that LA, in california, is under threat of swinging right if people protest vote too much. I’m sure of it, it just makes sense.

nah.

None of the busybodies trying to sabotage the local transit system seems to want to recognize the twelve cars behind the bus as the problem, of course.

I feel like I perhaps know who may be driving those cars

The abhorrently large firetrucks which increase the response times before they can get out to fires, because things are more spread out. The abhorrently large firetrucks which siphon away more and more funding, compared to smaller firetrucks, and require more manpower to operate, meaning each fire station individually eats up more funding per unit, meaning we can have less fire stations, further decreasing response times.

An increase in response times which increases the size of fires, requiring more and more abhorrently large firetrucks. The abhorrently large firetrucks which cannot respond quickly enough to wildfires and so will allow them to grow more rapidly out of control, perpetuating more wildfire based ecology, more plants which require fire to grow and will encourage further fire. The abhorrently large firetrucks which are not as cute as small firetrucks.

Those firetrucks? Those are the ones we have to build bigger roads for? some people do legitimately believe this shit, too, hoo lee, kill me

Doesn’t Lyft work sorta like that?

I’ve only ever heard of lyft being a normal taxi service where people just use their own cars they already own. Also, I dunno where you’re getting your numbers for the calculation you’re doing, that would probably be something good to include. You could say the same for everything I write, I guess, but none of my criticisms much have to do with the numbers, except for this: I dunno what “smaller european cars” you’re using. Most cars nowadays are like, 2 tons or so at the least, probably more, and you could maybe get one ton of human body weight, at the most, if you had several 250 pound chucks riding around in one car, which I don’t really imagine to be the case normally at all.

There’s also an efficiency created by the “inefficient” route planning of the bus. By having something that travels in a loop, rather than having every individual travel to every individual point, we’re trading some amount of efficiency in terms of total time spent by everyone (theoretically, but this time is probably eaten up by increased amounts of car traffic in reality), and we’re trading that for a slight increase in the amount of foot traffic that people are collectively engaging in, which is probably a good thing. So that’s a total decrease in curb weight as a factor of total travel time, which is a decrease in road maintenance.

You’re also probably looking at a massive decrease in mechanical maintenance for buses compared to cars, using one big engine, set of brakes, A/C systems, etc, rather than like 15-20 smaller non-standardized sets, and maintenance costs for the specific roads you’re traveling on via bus means you can engineer in less maintenance over time compared to a more spread out system.

Density is also a pretty big consideration, because real estate downtown, i.e. the location most people are going to want to go, is at a high premium, both for people and for the city/state’s tax base. High density has the capacity to provide a sustainable tax base for the cost of providing utilities and maintenance by the city… Unless you park the series of autonomous cars all in some huge superstructure outside of town, and then basically just merge them straight into the highway, where you’d still have to overbuild and deal with a massive amount of car infrastructure (more than just the space you’d save on all this parking, since you could just have a couple pickup and dropoff spaces, if that, compared to all this other parking taken up downtown). I can’t really see it working out, and even at the normal densities we’d be looking at, I’d struggle to come up with a way by which it’s more efficient overall.

There’s also other types of buses, if we’re just talking about emissions efficiency, or energy efficiency. Obviously an overhead electrified bus is probably the most desirable, just behind a tram or a streetcar or whatever. Then you have the weird stupid hybrid battery overhead-electrified buses that I hate, and then probably all your natural gas buses and diesel buses and whatnot, and then your pure battery buses.

If we’re talking about autonomous vehicles, then we’re kind of also sidestepping all these questions about like, the scalability of the AI for this, and the computing power we’d have to use on that, constantly. We’d have to deal with the traveling mailman problem on a near constant basis, something which public transport can mostly sidestep by assuming passengers will come to it, and that public transit will be of a high enough density to create desirable locations simply by stopping there. We have all the pedestrian and cyclist traffic conflicts which we’d encounter, or else have to segregate from these cars entirely (something normal traffic already struggles to do adequately). And if we’re segregating the traffic entirely with a large amount of infrastructure, which definitely makes this much more achievable and easier, if still not easy, I think it makes more sense from a top down maintenance perspective to just go for trams or streetcars, or subways, or something like that.

I think the only real way in which I can cook up a reason this might be done, is because it’s outsourcing costs onto the public, and onto the state. Road maintenance can be done by the city, or state. Probably, this would mean that the autonomous vehicles would not be segregated, which means it’s less of a good idea, which I believe, is the primary reason it hasn’t been done. Then, the taxi service could basically make a bunch of money on their highly necessary transportation, which they have created a large need for, simply by existing and demanding a large amount of infrastructure by existing.

Use bicycles, e-bikes, and walking for individual pedestrian point to point travel. Fuck all the bullshit excuses people give about how, oh no it’s too hot out, too rainy, too hilly, what do I do with this cargo that’s not large or consistently arriving or departing enough to be loaded by a freight train, or by a professional truck, but isn’t so small that I can carry it, what do I do with all my kids, etc… Use cars sparingly enough to fill the very minor amount of gaps that can’t be bridged by bikes, cycling, and public transit, as a method of last resort. Mostly for people that would maybe need to live out in the boonies, like park rangers, maybe. Actual farms, not the stupid rich people playtime “ranches”, and industrial locations, they usually have a large enough cargo haul to justify a small freight train, or a large truck taking a small route to a freight yard.

I mean I’m generally skeptical of like “this one weird 19th century ideology can solve all our problems” schtick, right, and I’m also skeptical of the mythical single tax systems, as a kind of simplified and idealistic compromise between your libertarians, your anarchists, and your more standard socialists and communists.

If you were to ask me in more detail, I would basically say that I think it’s a compromise solution for an extremely narrow set of problems that too often gets extrapolated into encompassing the entirety of a political system. I think that it functions well enough as an ideology within a specific set of constraints and goals, but if you seek to extrapolate it solve like, every political problem, as georgists generally tend to do, then it kind of falls apart, and doesn’t tend to be broad enough.

It’s basically just a less generalized version of marxism, to me, where land is equivalent in the system to capital, and rent-seeking behavior is only really banned from interference with whatever resources are seen as natural, which is primarily land. I dunno. I think as I slowly go more insane and become more cranky, I find myself increasingly wanting a horrible authoritarian state that just does exactly what I want, because everything I like is awesome, and everything everyone else thinks is bad and evil or whatever.

yeah georgism is crap though

but the government has to be pretty authoritarian in order to pull it off

I dunno if that’s a super necessary element, really. I think they could probably get off better, actually, if they had a more lenient prison system, and, say, didn’t execute people for minor weed possession or like, being gay. But then I also think their economy relies on a large portion of oppressed migrant labor, if I remember right? I dunno, somebody fact check me on that

I mean I would just get rid of the GOP if that were a viable option. and probably also the political system in which we live, as a whole.

I do think more realistically though the only point I’m making is that it’s a kind of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome, without understanding why they’re able to poison pill anything and everything and roll back any advancements as soon as they feel that the public pressure has let up enough. There’s a deeper issue there beyond just the lack of public housing, an issue that causes that lack of public housing in the first place, and simply building massive amounts of public housing, even if we were able to do that, which would be quite a feat, and something I would be happy about, even that would be a temporary solution, as we’ve seen.

I mean yeah, but I’m not sure we won’t just poison pill them again as soon as the metronome swings back around and keeps us from having anything nice.

The problem is the rentier class has the most resources to throw against this and they still can find other ways to rescarcify housing unless forced building programs are big enough to over power them.

Yeah, we probably just need to get rid of the rentier class. I don’t like them very much, I think they might be bad.

So if we can elect like, any old fuck now, can’t we just go even older and elect the corpse of mao or something? cause that’s kinda the only way I see rent, and rent specifically, becoming a non-issue in the near future. This is like one of the main issues which is directly symptomatic of capitalism, and which keeps capitalism as a system directly propped up. I don’t really see any long term solution to it that doesn’t involve a lot of no longer having capitalism. Other capitalist countries still have this problem. It’s only like, china and the former soviet union and apparently barcelona with superblocks which are still gonna be subject to market demands and rates, it’s only those countries which are going to be constructing such an excess of housing that a good amount of it can remain empty, which is also the case here as well but with the caveat that we still have massive amounts of homelessness and the empty housing is basically just to increase demand on top of straight up not having enough housing even were we to construct mass housing projects.

I dunno, this is a pretty good encapsulation of why we are specifically incredibly fucked and how this incrementalism isn’t going to work at all to address our current issues. We’re cooked, lads. Get the titanic band to start playing the song or whatever.

So, people can make the whole like, oh, this is a different context, kyle is joking, whatever whatever, right, and that’s both true and a fine argument to make. But I also think when we make this like, freedom as a principle argument, right, free speech as a principle, argument, it isn’t necessarily hypocritical.

We’re just not prioritizing freedom, prioritizing free speech, as the highest possible value that trumps all other values. I think kind of by necessity, it can’t be. The idea of free speech is logically incoherent if you take it to the extreme, because you could just define speech as being anything. Harmful acts, smearing poop on the bathroom walls, whatever. So you have to put a limit on it, and then those external values are going to be what places the limit on it.

Those external values of “I agree with kyle gass” vs “I agree with dave chapelle”. Agreeing with either argument, beyond that, thinking either argument, had in the public sphere, is worthwhile, that’s what has to define the limits of speech and freedom and what has to drive the outlook on it. I might oppose the poop swastika in the rec center bathroom, but I might think the ACAB poop smear in the nazi bar bathroom is maybe okay, even if it’s a little misguided or kind of just stupid or whatever.

There has to be a core value there. It’s not necessarily hypocritical to believe that political violence can be called for, or justified against your foes necessarily, and then think that the same thing shouldn’t be done to you on the nature of your ideology strictly being better. If my foes are basically just evil, straight up, yeah, probably at the very least stop them from like, having undue economic influence, which depending on who you ask, is gonna be some form of economic violence by nature of stripping away their agency or property or whatever. That doesn’t necessarily strike me as hypocritical, or not believing in equal rights or anything, it just strikes me as pragmatic.

US oil production hits all-time high

Executive action ordering the closure of border cutting asylum claims in half (according to FOX News)

Aren’t these generally seen as bad things, though?

I’ll also say a lot of this list is basically just routine infrastructure maintenance funding, which was arguably necessary, but I would much rather see a combating of the more institutional problems that led to this infrastructure being in such a state of disrepair in the first place. Expanding a highway, for example, not really something I would say is a great accomplishment. The economic citations are things that I find kind of suspicious more generally, because I’m familiar with the amount of laundering economists can accomplish when they really put their removed into it. Post-pandemic recovery, for example, I can think of a couple ways to spin that, most of them involve us having taken a very large hit from the pandemic compared to other countries because we had a shit ass pandemic response relative to other countries. Violent crime dropping from 2020 is gonna be a fuckin no brainer, for example, like obviously that’s gonna be the case, I don’t think you can really attribute that to a biden presidency.

Eliminate the padding in this list and back up what appear to be the stronger points and it would be more serious. As it stands, this is more just kind of a gish gallop. You’re just popping a bigass list with no citations and then that’s gonna look more credible while your opposition can’t do much in the face of it without looking like they’re nitpicking or denying reality, even though you don’t have any citations. It might be cynical, but I’ve been on the internet before, so I bet if I push back at all, you’re just gonna tell me to look into it further myself, and that it’s not your job to educate me even though you’re the one who has the burden of proof for making these claims, like how tankies tell me to read theory whenever I ask them questions about books they’ve supposedly read biblically and know so well.

In any case, a lot of these aren’t really fighting against the idea that the democrats just end up as a controlled opposition band-aid which barely does anything before fascism creeps back in and fucks something else up in our shitty pendulum system. It’s not really fighting against that claim, which I would say is the core nihilistic, apathetic claim that has to be disputed before people can be convinced that their vote will do something.