I mean the frustration is real, but the channels are what are accused of being engineered.
The don’t vote and protest vote crowds are basically purpose built to make it as hard as possible for America to even slow itself down, let alone begin reversing course.
“I have serious objections to the major legacies of discrimination and failures to address poverty in this country! Let’s take the exact actions that make it more likely for power to end up in the hands of the people who think the problem is we’re not doing enough of that!”
That is the narrative people accuse Russia and China of spreading, and it’s hardly a coincidence that this crescendos in exactly two times, 1) just before an election, and 2) just after a major consequence comes down as a result of the election that was meddled with.
I’m pretty sure that at least at the Old Place, despair-trolling is very much a thing,
Right-wing boiler-room operations, Putin’s troll farms, and independent dick heads have lots of reasons to sow apathy and despair.
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Are you discussing ways of fixing your political system in your third spaces? Are you organizing grassroots political movements that want to break the status quo and the class wars? Or are you just antagonizing everyone on the internet over a zero-sum choice you made up in your head? Or maybe you’re just agitating because you find it funny? Either way, you are not contributing positively to this issue, and your tribalism shows.
Didn’t the “vote for Genocide Joe he’s the lesser of two evils” win last time? How’s that going for the votées?
Better than the alternative.
Same as always. Badly, but not as badly as if we had voted to end democracy with Trump.
Marching slowly towards a cliff is no better than doing it quickly. Unless the course is changed the outcome will be the same.
That doesn’t mean it’s okay to sprint off the edge without a parachute. Of course we’re working to change course too. It’s not an overnight thing.
Well he’s one of the most productive presidents in modern history even in spite of the congressional odds stacked against him, so pretty well all things considered.
How are all those judges that Trump got to appoint because of the pretentious assholes who insist on calling Biden “Genocide Joe” doing?
Biden actually just tried to hide the arms deal with israel because he hates democracy and loves genocide.
https://truthout.org/articles/biden-wants-arms-deals-with-israel-to-be-done-in-complete-secrecy/
But let’s keep deflecting by pointing to orange man that’s all the Biden dreamers got going for them now.
You know you’re talking to a real leftist when they walk right up to the line of unironically quoting “orange man bad”
That’s a line that a real leftist would totally be able to choke out before instinctively committing ritual suicide out of how idiotic it would be to say that.
I’m just simplifying your amazing arguments that are so morally void that the only reason you’re defending one party is that the other party is worse.
I’m not stupid enough to vote for either of those parties.
Why he looks like french Lenin?
He’s a beatnik
For those that are curious, this is possible because the US has monetary sovereignty in a fiat currency. This means that the federal government is able to allocate literally trillions of dollars more than the annual budget without harming the economy in any way, because a vast majority of US debt (and deficit) is to the US federal government.
It brings up arguments for MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) which is one of the scariest boogeymen Republican leadership has ever heard of… So you know it’s probably fire and a very good option for future US. It’s been years but Unfucking The Republic did an episode I really liked on it that could probably use a revisit.
Thanks for the podcast recommendation! I’ve been needing more things to listen to during work
It’s a bogeyman because it’s shit nonsense economics. It’s a one way ticket to hyperinflation.
Well they can fiat me a few bucks. I need it more than some douchebag in Jerusalem.
What countries AREN’T on fiat currency.
Every country I know about has a fiat currency, but the monetary sovereignty bit is also important. Governments within the EU don’t have monetary sovereignty, and therefore are limited by taxation. The EU as a whole could do the same thing, because they are the body that controls the Euro.
If you talk about currencies that are backed in gold, then none. The last country to abolish the Gold standard was Switzerland at some point in the 1990s.
Absolutely spot on. This video explains this very well.
this sounds like ron paul stuff, what are you saying
What are you confused about? This is basic Modern Monetary Theory. The US government just decides that funding genocide is more worthwhile than helping the citizens.
It’s completely garbage economics. Some innumerate people think that printing money indefinitely won’t lead to hyper inflation.
Israel has enslaved the US taxpayer to their genocidal stormtroopers. The lines are drawn.
Enslaved? Afaik the US government has willingly funded Israel as part of their strategy for years.
And not only are you getting that twisted, you’re also trivializing slavery while villifying a group for something they did not do.
I have no stake in this war, but I do want to point out that your choice of words is very inaccurate and inappropriate.
bro, do you know how much of the US govt is jewish and/or zionist?
if you say anything criticizing them, AIPAC will donate tons of money to your opponent.
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1717700125512913232
The Senate just UNANIMOUSLY adopted a resolution condemning pro-Palestine student protesters as “in solidarity with Hamas” and anti-semitic. The resolution calls to “fully and completely support Israel” in its war on Gaza
Everyone from Bernie Sanders to Rand Paul voted for this
the Deconstructed podcast touched on this recently. somehow this is how we wound up with dick durbin
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This kind of thinking makes you morally obligated to stop paying taxes (I’m for it)
A more constructive conclusion would be to actually improve things, by not eliminating taxes but spending them differently.
I think a good first step would be an Aus style bill that breaks down how your tax dollars got spent by the share of the budget that went to whatever we spent money on.
Actually seeing how much money went to foreign aid or debt repayments or MIC contracts would at least start an informed discourse on how are taxes get spent
Won’t happen unless immediate and immense pressure is applied to politicians. Such as threatening their livelihood by not paying taxes (their paycheck)
Or you know, violence. It’s easy to beg for change, but without action they are under no obligation to do anything.
I don’t disagree :) The initial comment just didn’t outline that.
If that’s what it takes
There I was, thinking people on Lemmy might me smarter than on Reddit… Regarding most comments, not just yours.
If anything Lemmy is even worse. At least on Reddit you could find niche subs where uninformed or objectively stupid comments would be ruthlessly downvoted and it was only the big subs where one would encounter the idiot masses with their mob mentality.
Lemmy doesn’t have any niche subs like that, at least not yet, or not that I’m aware of. Accordingly, the signal to noise ratio here sucks. The gibbering idiot masses almost entirely drown out the few intelligent, well-informed and thoughtful comments there are.
The Israeli disinformation and social media battalions are out in force and moving into decision roles on platforms. I was banned for telling a troll I hope when karma finds him he remembers his cheering of children dying. That was a ban for me…seriously horrible people.
This is the reason I left the other website.
Why does Israel need the money? They have one of the worlds best trained and equipped armies in the world. They have state of the art technology and they are fighting an irregular gerillas armed with rpg and home made rockets.
The IDF doesn’t want to risk the lives of their own soldiers, so they prefer to sacrifice thousands of children instead. Sending in a ground force of occupiers would likely minimize civilian deaths, but it would lead to many more Israeli soldiers losing their lives. That’s why they prefer artillery attacks. Palestinian children are expendable compared to mandatory Israeli conscripts.
That’s how you know that even the Israelis don’t agree with this war. This would be like if Bush hesitated to invade Afghanistan because of how much shit would hit the fan when coffins started coming back and Americans started demanding to know why US soldiers should be dying for the sake of…well at that point it actually just was straight up a militarized manhunt for one guy so…
They don’t need it, we just want to give it so we have a reason to buy more.
And yet… Nothing happens… 🤷🏼♂️
It’s funny because people now are way more depressed than during the literal constant wars in europe. Just a few years ago, we had nothing but small sporadic conflicts, yet people still screamed that we’re all doomed. Makes you wonder doesn’t it?
Remember, the difference between propaganda and information is does it serve US interests.
The only truly bipartisan topic in American Politics is that the Defense budget always goes up.
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The US just passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill a few years ago for those schools and roads that are “falling apart” on top of the ~$125 billion spent annually on transportation and education at the federal level. States and local government pay another ~$700 billion per year for education and ~$350 billion per year on transportation.
Genuine question, where does this money go? Nothing is improving. People are still in a lot of college debt, college fees are not getting any cheaper, kids still aren’t getting free meals in schools, roads still look like shit all over the country, transportation is still absolute garbage, and don’t get me started on our healthcare system. Again, where does that money go? I really would love to know, not trying to argue, I just want to know.
The really funny thing is that these are almost entirely domestic sectors.
Like, seriously, investing in healthcare, infrastructure, education…these should be no-brainers. Every single dollar invested into these gets spent multiple times within American borders, through American businesses and American laborers, and has real tangible returns like “a well educated workforce (and education==higher income==higher income taxes; and also more spend on sales taxes, real estate taxes, interest, etc)” and “healthy living people” and “transporting goods and services for sale”.
But you’re talking about good things. Good things means better society. Better society means more power to people which means our lords the billionaires class won’t have as much control over people to syphon more profit out of them. If you have not heard of the channel “second though”, I’d highly recommend you watch some of his videos. He’s not perfect, but he does have some good topics. One of them is this about why a lot of people are poor.
What state are you in?
Genuine question, where does this money go? Nothing is improving.
This is such an obviously untrue statement. Come on. Nothing is improving? I’m sure that it varies wildly by state and who’s running the state, but in my state it seems like there’s constantly roads, highways, bridges, etc being repaved, rebuilt, rerouted, or otherwise improved in some way. I’ve seen a few new schools pop up in my town and they’ve been working on renovating some of the older ones.
Student loans, school lunches, public transportation, and healthcare are outside the scope of the original post that I was addressing.
I don’t know what bubble you live in, but it certainly sounds good. I’ll just move next to you to get some of that American dream y’all got there 😂
What state are you in?
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Great. That’s about 5 trillion less than we need. The US Army Corps of Engineers estimates we need 3 trillion just for emergency repair projects.
Source?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/30/politics/infrastructure-us-investment-cost-engineers/index.html
My memory turned 2.6 into 3. But yeah, we’re not even keeping up maintenance.
In fairness, if you ask people of basically any industry whether their industry needs more money, they will always say yes. Teachers will always say we’re not spending enough on education, police will always say we’re not spending enough on police, business owners will always say we’re not spending enough on them, etc.
And yet teachers have to buy school supplies out of their own pay, and we have news footage of collapsing infrastructure.
Teachers shouldn’t have to do that.
No they shouldn’t. My point is some of these industries really do need more funding.
That seems like a total bullshit number. The closest thing I can find is from 2021 where a report from the Congressional Research Service mentioned a $109 billion project backlog for the Army Corps of Engineers.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11945/2
Edit:
OP confused “Army Corps of Engineers” and “American Society of Civil Engineers”. He also exaggerated the bit about “emergency repairs” and neglected to mention that the $3 trillion figure was for spending over the course of a decade.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/30/politics/infrastructure-us-investment-cost-engineers/index.html
Then you didn’t look very hard.
The price tag to bring it into good repair? Nearly $2.6 trillion over 10 years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers
That’s the “American Society of Civil Engineers”, not the “US Army Corps of Engineers” like your original comment said. It’s also not “emergency repairs”. $2.6 trillion is the amount that needs to be paid for over the next 10 years to keep things in “good repair”. The $1.2 trillion takes us a little less than halfway there. Toss in the federal and local budgets for transportation and that’s another $4 trillion over the next 10 years. More than likely more money will be made available in the next decade for additional projects.
The budget was for a decade of spending. That’s how it got to be over a trillion dollars in the first place. Depending on future appropriations that may or may not occur isn’t policy, it’s just wishing.
And yeah my memory was a little fuzzy. But it’s not exactly painting a rosy picture.
lezgo
Huh?
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Settle down Francis.
Hell, Americans don’t look upon America kindly. They don’t need any extra ire from us
