Edit: new and improved image, now with 100% less support! Used my expert photo editing skills to change āsupportingā to say āvoting forā
Edit: new and improved image, now with 100% less support! Used my expert photo editing skills to change āsupportingā to say āvoting forā
Downvote me if you, but I still donāt understand what was so terrible about Trump. No new wars, cheap gas, cheap groceries, good economy, literally the worst thing I can recall from those years was reading in the news every day trying to explain why Trump was literally the worst thing that had ever happened to America.
Until 2020 happened, that is; but even if he admittedly didnāt do a great job at handling COVID or the George Floyd protests, Iām not sure Hillary would have done any better, or could have avoided them entirely.
Now everything is expensive as hell, everyone is depressed and angry all the time, but at least the news are mostly saying Biden is doing a great job, things are fine and everything is under control. Itās as if cognitive dissonance has become the new normal.
Iām gonna put it in a bulleted list so itās easier for you to understand:
Because of Trumpās piss-poor handling of Covid and four years of corporate welfare
Because the orange man and his supporters are still threatening our democracy daily
Trump supporters like those things, they just donāt want to say it publicly. Just ask them āwhat do you think of (any minority group)?ā and watch them squirm.
At least half of these are just made up nonsense straight from those bogus headlines I was talking about.
The other half are exaggerated and blown out of proportion to make them seem worse than what actually happened.
Iāve seen this argument from another poster as well but it still doesnāt make any sense to me.
If Trumpās corporate welfare was responsible for keeping prices low while he was in office, and Biden ending it caused them to raise prices to make profit another way, then wasnāt it actually good for the ordinary customer? How exactly does Biden sticking it to them help you if you end up paying for it every day at the checkout register? Sounds like sticking a knife in your own flesh to own the rich.
By living rent free in your head, mostly.
If you donāt mind lots of new corruption in the federal government, maybe Trump seemed ok. But here you go:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-complete-listing-atrocities-1-1-056#2017
I think if Hilary was President, weād have had a serious conversation about policing reform.
This is mainly due to the Fed under Trump printing a shit ton of new money. Remember all the āmoney printer go brrā memes? And remember how everyone said it would cause huge inflation? Yeah it just took a minute to kick in.
Inflation wasnāt caused by āprinting moneyā, or even COVID PPP loans being unpaid. It was mainly caused by businesses realizing they controlled many aspects of peopleās lives.
When people were paying $50 for some toilet paper, most daily essentials companies realized that people were willing to pay more than they expected. There are very few tp companies and not many Americans install a bidet.
Americans mostly got raises during COVID and that allowed many companies to raise prices. You always have to eat, clean your house, wash your clothes, go to the bathroom, etc. This is just the consequence of a lack of competition among companies in the US (and other countries).
I agree with you that that is a large factor, and certainly a problem, but inflation has always been very strongly correlated with the money supply; you canāt just simply ignore the āprinting moneyā aspect of it.
No, money supply is not strongly correlated with inflation. Right now M2 is shrinking while inflation is still positive. That wouldnāt happen if they were strongly positively correlated.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL#
Hereās better explanations:
https://www.nber.org/digest/20239/unpacking-causes-pandemic-era-inflation-us
Meaning āpeople have more money, so producers increased pricesā.
We already see that there is a time lag effect, so does that actually matter?
Anyway, this disagrees with the paper you linked:
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042015/how-does-money-supply-affect-inflation.asp
Itās also curious (from reading the abstract) that the paper you linked didnāt seem to include money supply in their model? Was that deliberate?
But Iām also just generally skeptical of anything that tries to blame labor or wages for inflation.
Perhaps, but would it have been done in time to prevent George Floydās death? Look at how Trumpās border wall worked out despite all the effort he put towards it.
And COVID would likely still have happened unless youāre willing to go so deep into the conspiracy rabbit hole to be willing to say that Democrats released in on purpose to get rid of Trump. Would she have done a better job at handling that? More people died on Bidenās watch than on Trumpās, even if it was only due to the fact he had to deal with it longer.
No, but I donāt think thatās the bar.
George Floyd gets murdered, people get mad, people protest; the Trump response was ālol lib cities suck, thin blue line kiddosā. With Hilary maybe we couldāve talked about police resourcing, effective disciplinary actions, malpractice, etc. and got something done. Instead we got a gray flag with a blue stripe. And more polarization.
Not sure how the Trump wall is relevant.
Perhaps not, but at the very least she wouldnāt have been pushing conspiracy theories on a national stage. I like to imagine she wouldāve helped small businesses more, but the mainstream Dems wonāt bite the corpo hand that feeds them either, so /shrug.
You included your own rebuttal so I donāt know what point you are trying to make.
Yeah, Iām not saying he did a great job at handling it, mostly he just poured more oil on the fire. A more diplomatic approach likely wouldnāt have hurt, even if the probability is very high that not much change would have come from it. At least as long as people are talking, they arenāt burning down any cities.
Itās relevant as an example of how even the most ardent campaign promises often turn into dust during the actual term. And thatās a problem that affect both sides, I just mentioned Trump here because itās a very well known example.
Right, see comment above. But honestly Iām still surprised he doesnāt get more credit for not starting any new wars. Thanks to Biden, weāre now funding massive slaughter in both Ukraine AND Israel to the tune of billions of dollarsā¦ but somehow, everyoneās cool with that. But God help us if that money is spent on ācorporate welfareā and turns into lower consumer prices. As if giving away all those weapons to Zelensky wasnāt also massive corporate welfare for the military industrial complex. Priorities, right?
Yet another disingenuous, ājust asking questions,ā huh? āOh no the news is out to get him when he did nothing wrong!ā
Everything is as expensive as hell because Donald and the GQP have given out trillions in handouts to the wealthy, given out three years of tax cuts to the wealthy, blocked all attempts at fair wages, blocked all attempts at affordable healthcare, blocked all attempts at taxing corporations. Somehow we have both high price inflation and record profits for every corporation. Thatās not adding up. Itās only Bidenās fault if youāre deliberately ignoring reality.
Of course we should also consider Donald is a lifelong crook and a rapist who is corrupt as fuck. Biden wonāt sell state secrets to Russia and the Saudis like Donald did.
āRight off the bat, let me accuse you of something I have no proof for, just to frame this as an honest and fair debate.ā
That doesnāt make any sense, why would any of those things make consumer prices more expensive?
Wages DID rise under Biden but theyāre barely keeping up with inflation so for the average worker, things are no better now than they were under Trump, or am I wrong there?
Okay so how is that Trumpās fault though? Did the handouts he gave help keep prices low and now that Biden isnāt giving any, theyāre trying to make their profit by raising prices instead? Explain.
And Biden isnāt? Did he not have a lifelong friendship with a KKK grand wizard? Did he not say he didnāt want his kids to grow up in a racial jungle? Did he not sponsor the 1994 crime bill that put millions of black people in jail for minor offenses? Is his son not a drug addict who films himself banging underage Chinese hookers and then leaves the footage on laptop he forgets to pick up from the repair guy?
LOL āno proofā of the deliberate dishonesty disguised as questioning. Thank you for ending the comment with some classic insane right talking points so that we know youāre utterly disinterested in the truth.
Which of the things Iāve said about Biden were wrong? Theyāve all been reported by the mainstream media at this point. Dismissing them as āinsane talking pointsā only proves that YOU arenāt really interested in the truth.
I think roe v. wade was a pretty high profile one that probably wouldnāt have happened without him, no?
Sure, but whatās the big deal about that? It didnāt get rid of abortion or anything, it just made it a statesā rights issue again.
Yes, some conservative states moved to criminalize it immediately but thereās always going to be states like NY or CA where itāll remain legal if you really need it. Itās not like people need access to abortions every day of their lives, and even when they do, they generally have a window of time thatās weeks if not months long, so not being able to do it in your home state is an inconvenience at best. Nevertheless, people reacted like it was about three 9/11s all happening at once. A bit overblown if you ask me, when a plane ticket to California is maybe a couple hundred bucks most of the year.
I will take other statesā rights issues, for 500, alex, which is not a good look. I also must note that weāve moved from, in what way was trump bad, to, okay, well, heās done this bad thing, but it was overblown, which I would also say, probably not, no. I dunno, really, but probably not, it seems pretty bad.
Not everyone can afford a couple hundred dollar plane ticket to california, including teenagers, and both populations are those that I would think would be most at risk for pregnancy, and at risk for medical complications as a result of pregnancies. Also pretty likely populations to want to take abortions into their own hands, which, you know, not something associated with good medical outcomes. Weāve also got some amount of public health problems related to the overjudicious ban of abortion, leading to doctors not wanting to abort kids that are putting the mother at high risk, from what Iāve heard, which seems like a pretty bad situation. I also think thereās a good argument that, even if itās not problematic at like, the scales it is purported to be, or if weāre not being like āoh well it sets a bad precedentā slippery slope bullshit, Iād say itās still pretty bad just on the principle of the thing.
The supreme court appointment that lead up to it is also kind of bad, and could potentially have a bunch of different pretty bad ramifications, but I canāt really remember whether or not anything else bad has happened, or is about to, cause I donāt keep up with this shit that much. I wouldnāt be surprised if theyāre gonna fuck up some school privatization thing, or repeal some foundational internet bill, or do some shit that nobodyās really paying attention to or cares about but would have a good amount of impact. I donāt think theyāre doing that right now, but I wouldnāt be surprised if that were to happen. You better not hit me with a āwell they shouldnāt have had sex thenā or something stupid like that in response to this, that shitās a pretty easy bad faith tell.
And I mean like, sure, most of the libtards who kind of spout āoh the republicans want to ban abortions so they can have a bunch of new mindless worker drones from forced birthsā are living in fairyland, and are kind of doing a classic reverse hanlonās razor bit, but I would pretty easily discard that out of hand on the basis that itās fucking ridiculous propaganda, itās like listening to republicans screech about the death of family values, itās vacuous political fearmongering bullshit. I dunno enough about the other issues people accuse trump of, right, not enough to have a conversation about them, really, but if theyāre kind of matched in their relative amounts of shittiness to this, I would kind of get it. Maybe not the content of like, calling him a fat dumb cheeto, or whatever these kinds of stupid insults are, right, but I would get the spirit of the thing, even if I donāt agree with their like, extrapolations, or reactions.
Also if Iām remembering from your other responses in the thread (fuck taking 5 seconds to check, amirite?), you didnāt really care about his purported tax cuts on the rich as much, which I would think would put you in like, the center a little more. Then, you know, no shit that youāre going to like trump at least a little more, or, not see as much of a problem with him, as people who are more to the left than you are, I would think, and at that point, itās kind of like, asking people why trump is so bad, is asking people to maybe change your more foundational political beliefs. Which I would say, isnāt necessarily a bad thing, but I think there might be some better approaches to that.
I donāt know of any on lemmy, but some might exist, and reddit sucks for that kinda stuff pretty hard nowadays, so I donāt really know many places online that are good for actually interrogating your political beliefs. Generally though, I would say it would be more productive to go foundational issue to foundational issue (not wedge issues), rather than asking questions about like, whether or not trump is good. So like, asking about the role of power in politics, whether or not it has a role. Whether or not humans, as a species, are naturally hierarchical, and if thatās a good thing. What the economy should look like, ideally, shit like that.
Not sure where thatās going exactly but I donāt really have a problem with states rights. I thought diversity is good thing, no? The more things are regulated on a federal level, the more uniform the country becomes. And I thought people here hated fascismā¦ but I digress.
Yes, there has got to be a certain minimum standard of things we all agree on for a federal union to work, but apart from that, Iām all for giving states as much freedom as possible to experiment with their own regulations. Letās be honest, nobody really knows what the best way is to deal with all these issues we have.
So if California wants to tackle the future by building a high tech, EV-based, genderfluid LGBT society, why shouldnāt they? As long as people who donāt like that have the option to go to some other state and homestead on an organic backwoods farm, hunt deer, and worship Odin or whatever, thatās fine with me. Isnāt that what freedom is supposed to be about? Why do so many people these days have this weird notion that it has to be all or nothing, and everyone else has to want what THEY want or else be forced to participate?
Simply put, most people who believe in any sort of moral code, believe in such a code because they think they are correct. If they didnāt think they were correct, they wouldnāt believe it. This includes whatever people might be able to entertain about what would be correct in a given hypothetical scenario, or a broader issue. Extrapolation to the broad.
The reason āstates rightsā is kind of an iffy look is, you know, retroactive slavery justification from southern civil war apologists, but also, as a rhetorical tactic broadly, people bring up statesā rights as a kind of distraction. Now, weāre not talking about roe v. wade, whether or not roe v. wade was a good decision, or whether or not itās good for women to have access to healthcare, which, you know, it is, right, I donāt think thatās particularly controversial. Now, weāre talking about statesā rights, experimentation with democracy, that sorta shit, which is kind of blech.
I would also generally be opposed to other peopleās freedoms when they start doing harm, right, which is kind of a vacuous statement or whatever, right, how do we qualify harm? But if someoneās doing an organic backwoods farm where theyāre introducing invasive species and destabilizing the ecosystem, thatās a problem. If people are sacrificing their firstborn to odin, Iād say thatās also a problem. If people are entering that kind of lifestyle en masse to such a degree that it starts to destabilize everyone elseās lives, or cause them active harm, thatās also a problem. See my first paragraph, here.
We can also see how thereās kind of a more complicated relationship between states in something like the whole controversy between new york and texas, and immigrant buses, or whatever. New york wants to create a kind of liberal society, where their citizens have social safety nets, and they can benefit off of migrant labor while attempting to integrate them into society, right, relative to texas, in which migrant labor is exploited via under the table deals, on the basis that there is no legitimate alternative because the immigration system is super underfunded (this happens in new york too, this is a bad example, but entertain the hypothetical for a moment, Iām making a broader point here). If new york receives a shit ton of immigrants and floods their capacity to manage them all, their social safety nets will fail, and everything will kind of regress to the mean, to the status quo, which is going to be a problem especially when youāre getting a lack of political will and buy-in to lots of these ideas, and these things can be kind of repealed on a whim. We see the same thing almost in reverse, again, with texas, where they can lower their taxes on corporations to be next to nothing, and then suddenly all the corporations pull out of cities like san francisco and LA, and move to texas, and everything just kind of, races to the bottom, as it were. States do this all the time, where senators compete to be more favorably looked upon by corporations with their political decisions in order to get factories and ābring jobsā to their states, and get more voter turnout, even if the quality of life in their states ends up massively suffering as a result. It is a free market approach to a country.
To compress a lot of that metaphor, statesā rights, sure, but, statesā rights to do what? But I have completely digressed, I still find this to be kind of an aside, a tangent.
Itās a frustrating turnaround to encounter, ja feel? I come up against it a lot when I bring up, say, like, car-centricity, right. I can point out a lot of the problems with the lifestyle. It doesnāt scale well, itās not useful in many circumstances, etc, but then I bump up against this problem of, well, actually, itās their choice, so, eat it loser, nobody cares. They donāt contest the actual content of the point Iām making, or whether or not Iām right or wrong about a specific thing, they just say, oh, well, other people can choose to be wrong if they want. I can accept that, but you can understand why thatās also not a satisfying answer at all, right? Itās an anti-empathy answer, itās incurious, it doesnāt seek to learn about other peopleās perspectives or lives in any way, and it doesnāt seek truth. Thatās kind of not what Iām about.
Just from a legal standpoint, Roe v. Wade was always iffy because it was basically the Supreme Court making a law from the bench, which is not its constitutionally assigned role.
If people had wanted to make abortion access a National law, they should have gone through the proper political process and amended the constitution. But they didnāt do that, because they couldnāt get the required majorities in the house and senate, so instead Democrats stacked the court and rammed it through that way.
No matter how you feel about abortion, it was always a bad decision and a stain on the country, and nullifying was the correct decision. Comparing it to slavery is silly because pregnancy and childbirth are natural functions of the female body, slavery is not. And we did pass an amendment to abolish the latter so statesā rights can no longer allow it.
Thatās how things are supposed to work. The condition is the legal framework thatās applicable in all 50 states and trumps any state right, and as long as a state abides by that they should be free to do whatever the majority of residents want. Like I said, the beauty of this design is you can always move somewhere else if you donāt like it, because chances are, in a country this big thereās always people somewhere that share the same values as you do.
I mean, again, we can kind of understand that ājust move somewhere elseā isnāt a great response to issues somewhat might have, right?
But also, and this will probably be my last point, here, I donāt take the same perspective on these kind of legalistic frameworks that you do, I think. I donāt give a shit if they go through the proper channels or not to get something done, what I care about is whether or not theyāre doing something thatās right or wrong. I think abortion is a pretty good thing to have for a lot of reasons that Iāve previously described, so I want it around, I want everyone to have access to their baby-killing stem cell organ harvesting clinic, and thatās basically as far as my opinion goes.
The legal frameworks are the means to the end, theyāre not the end in-and-of itself. And itās not necessarily that the ends justify the means, or anything, but I have a couple reasons for believing why the means donāt really matter in this particular case. Believing that the means themselves are the ends, would kind of be the most absurd perspective to take, youād have to be an extremely dyed in the wool lib to believe that, you know. Youād have to like, not believe in shit like gerrymandering, fptp voting being fucking ass, not believe in shit like local city councils making zoning decisions that concentrate black voters into smaller and smaller voting blocks and ghettos. Those are all ends that are achieved by ālegitimateā political processes here in the states, and were undone by āillegitimateā protests, illegitimate means. Or at least, they were viewed as illegitimate at the time. If everyone who believes in the same shit all move to the same exact place, you get redlining, you get ghettos.
Again, also, I must point out, weāre not debating over whether or not abortion is good or bad, weāre debating over the legal framework that established it, now, which isnāt really what Iām interested in. I donāt really give a shit about that, for the aforementioned reasons. If abortion is a good thing, generally, if itās a good thing for society at large, which, Iām pretty sure is the case, Iām pretty sure weāve come to a consensus on that, then I donāt really care whether or not people have access to abortions legally or illegally, as long as they have good access, as long as they have safe access. I only care about the legal legitimacy, in this case, of abortion, only in the fact that, perhaps if it had been passed by amending the constitution, some shit that never happens because our democracy sucks, again for aforementioned reasons, right, I only care about the process as much as it enshrines it as a right more concretely.
But of course, we donāt live in that timeline, and I have to deal with current reality.
So you think forcing everyone to just go along with your wishes is a better response, then?
You realize not everyone in this country shares your opinion on abortion being a good thing, right? Saying you that you donāt care by what means itās established as a right IS basically saying that the ends DO justify the means, and that if necessary, youād be willing to disenfranchise, beat down, or even kill anyone who doesnāt agree with your opinion.
Again, the constitution is the framework of basic rights and prohibitions that we all agree on. And while I agree that having to move somewhere else to get something you really care about, if itās a split issue, like abortion is, where a large enough minority disagrees on it being a good thing, perhaps moving somewhere else isnāt as awful a compromise, is it?
Iām not from the US, but in general, government policy takes a few years to affect the economy. I remember Trump cutting a lot of taxes; this may have something to do with the current state of the US economy.
That said, I agree that Trump did get some things right, such as not starting new wars (although he often threatened to), working to end the war with Afghanistan, and opposing āfree tradeā deals.
>Downvote me if you, but I still donāt understand what was so terrible about Trump. No new wars, cheap gas, cheap groceries, good economy, literally the worst thing I can recall from those years was reading in the news every day trying to explain why Trump was literally the worst thing that had ever happened to America.
since the mid 2010s fascism has been marching across the world. golden dawn (the grecian fascists) had even set up a remote office in chicago. le pen almost won in france. AfD won seats in germany. and in america, protectionist, anti-immigrant rhetoric made our neo-nazis think that trump is their guy. literally. they called him āour guyā.
the traditionalist workers party marched in california, and knifed the high schoolers who showed up to resist them. people knew richard spencerās name. they embraced the ādeplorableā moniker. and their guy was getting more news coverage than practically all other ānewsā events combined. there seemed to be no repercussions for the street violence from the right.
trumpās xenophobia made many believe he was literally hitler. his first moves in office, like the muslim travel ban, only heightened this sense. the orwellian phrases āfake newsā and āalternative factsā also served to compound the sense that things were very wrong.
but in the 3 years that followed, i have to admit that his rhetoric sucked but his actual actions in office were pretty benign. his judicial appointments were fucking dystopian, but not unexpected for any other republican like cruz or rubio. his executive appointments (like department of education) were likewise awful-but-expected.
i still wonāt vote for him. but i didnāt vote for biden, and i wonāt be doing that this year either unless there are some significant moves from biden that i donāt believe are reasonable to expect.
to be fair, those chucklefucks also do this to ryan gosling, but I like ryan gosling. point, i suppose, is that believing the opposite of fascists is probably a good heuristic, but it isnāt really a great like, reliable fact. see: the milk gallon psyop, or the OK symbol psyop.