mozz

Somebody figured out that a lot of human judgement comes down to groupthink. If you see a bunch of people who are clearly operating guided by some assumptions, then you'll take those assumptions on and start being guided by them, whether the people you saw were real or fake.

Then, a few years ago, it became cheap and easy to flood both social media and news media with restatements of whatever assumptions you want people to pretend that are guided by.

And so, behold: The economy is crashing, which is all Biden's fault, and he's a weak candidate who loves genocide. Everyone's disappointed in him. Everyone knows all these things and sees them all the time. The simple repetition is actually a very solid system for producing the public opinion you want to produce.

At the present moment, they are trying to do it tactically with the "anyone who is disagreeing with me is trying to silence me, in fact they are literally hitting me in the face (also! Note that I'm allowed to disagree with whoever I want)" narrative -- simply repeating it, over and over, in the hopes (probably pretty well founded) that people will start to absorb it and behave the way they want them to behave.

Yeah. Inflation is real (Covid aftereffects and corporate greed), and in 2022 it hit this huge spike so prices are still high. As far as I can see the reasons for that had nothing to do with Biden, but I get it; it's painful to people directly, so it's the part of the equation that's easy to focus on, and it's easy to blame the guy who's "in charge" because he's supposed to take responsibility for things being good, whether they're his fault originally or not.

At the same time Biden actually has done a ton of things (boosting domestic manufacturing and supporting unions through an actually-pro-labor NLRB) which have been boosting wages. A lot of it is at the lower end of the scale, so I think it's largely invisible to Lemmy people who my guess is are largely tech workers or students or etc (as opposed to truck drivers), but the wages at the bottom have actually outpaced even the huge inflationary level.

Blaming Biden for the inflation, and pretending the wage gains didn't happen, and pretending that Biden's policies are neoliberal is... I mean, I get how it could look that way (again especially if you exist at the white-collar end of the scale in a tech job), but it's definitely not what happened.

It is undesirable that politicians use our tax money this way, yes. This is a pretty dumb attempt at a semantic "gotcha" given that I'm here literally criticizing the Democrats for helping fund ICE.

Yes. They are my tax dollars. No, I do not want them spent that way. The Democrats do want to spend them on fascist shit. Do you understand how that works? How not supporting a thing is not the same as supporting it?

My point is that whether you say you "want" to support it or not, you are.

Similarly, whether or not Biden "wants" to support it, he's embedded in a system that sometimes might do things he doesn't want. In particular, on immigration, a lot of it is in the hands of people in congress who are explicitly malicious.

I'm not trying to excuse him for anything, and he's obviously in a better position to influence the system than you are. But, just like you not wanting your tax dollars to fund something you don't want doesn't really change whether it happens (and so, you are funding a fascist organization), Biden wanting the immigration policy to be one way or another doesn't really mean anything if congress is setting rules that he doesn't want.

I don't think it's a secret that the Republicans have been pushing for more explicit cruelty in our system and Biden has been compromising with them in order to try to accomplish other things (some of which are good things for people), even knowing that some of what comes in might be bad, in the same way that you might pay your taxes even knowing that some of what it's funding is bad.

Surely makes sense? Maybe not, IDK; apparently my brain is scrambled. But to me the analogy seemed to be pretty understandable.

Like, your fascist brain can't even wrap itself around the fact that maybe there's some other reality here besides the one right-wingers have been portraying for the past twenty years.

Your rhetoric is quite literally indistinguishable from that of a MAGA supporter.

You caught me man. If there's one thing that's a common thread in all of my comments it's love for the right-wing reality and MAGA style rhetoric. Go back and read my comments about ICE and imagine them on Truth Social, and they'd fit right in.

So, there is so much here that it's a little hard to respond to without taking a big chunk of my day to do a bunch of research. But looking over it to some extent, it looks to me like I pretty much already gave my quick take on it:

Part of the Democratic immigration plan is to boost resources for ICE ... and increase the number of judges to clear the backlog, which will decrease that side of the misery. Part of the plan is to deliberately increase the cruelty in some parts of the system ... so that the Republicans will make a deal and actually pass the thing.

As an example here's what the HRW article says:

On the date of your inauguration, fewer than 15,000 people were in ICE detention. This presented a remarkable opportunity to wind down a wasteful and abusive system. Indeed, your own 2023 and 2024 budget requests sought significantly decreased detention funding. ICE began internal reviews of the system, recommending the closure or downsizing of numerous facilities because of dangerously abusive conditions.

As the political winds shifted, so did your funding requests to Congress. In October 2023, you requested supplemental detention funding, and your FY2025 budget request sought funding for 34,000 beds instead of the 25,000 sought in the two previous cycles. The result is unsurprising: the FY2024 spending bill you signed provides ICE $3.4 billion to jail an average of 41,500 immigrants per day, historically high funding surpassing all four years of the Trump administration.

I honestly just don't have much reaction to add to this besides what I said up above. They're not remarking on the massive backlog of people (including the people waiting on the Mexican side of the border, which is a significant source of suffering, since unlike people in custody there's no particular guarantee of food, water, or sanitation while they're just camping there for months and months). They're not wrong about the compromises Biden has been making with the Republicans, and the increased cruelty that's being allowed into the system as a result, though. They're not remarking at all on the things in Biden's proposals that will reduce the misery (increasing judges being the main one) -- which is fine, I mean, it's not their job to come up with explanations for why something might be inhumane; they're just pointing out that it's terrible and asking that he fix it. But like I say, it seems like anything whether cruel or mixed or beneficial that Biden tries to do now is going to be blocked by the Republicans, so it's all moot.

I'm just not sure how you take away from all of that any kind of conclusion that 100% of it is Biden's favorite thing (as opposed to something dictated in part by circumstances or Republican maliciousness), or that it doesn't matter whether it's Biden or Republicans because they're all the same.

Indeed

We need more Conspiracy Theory Rock level events

"for your PROgress" 🫡

That should tell you that it's not some politicized reaction, it's the actual lived experience of the Average Joe.

That's one interpretation, yes. There are others.

Right now on front page I see only 3 posts with 20+ comments, and none are about Biden or the economy:

• Bing outage
• Microplastic in balls
• Scientist harassment

(actually, it looks like this comment pushed this post to 20 technically)

So I actually meant the /c/politics "front page"; I should have used some other type of word.

Here's the list of stories currently on the politics sub:

• Economics, 23 comments, 56% are repetitions of basically exactly the same comment
• Housing, 0 comments
• Biden is out of touch, 30 comments, comments are a big shitshow of "Biden's the worst" "Trump is worse" "Biden's the worst" "Trump is worst"
• Palestine protests, 0 comments
• Brexit / Trump, 0 comments
• Restrictions on voting, 0 comments
• Israel, 0 comments
• Rudy Giuliani, 4 comments
• Biden + economy, 12 comments most of whom are calling out the OP article for being shit

A better metric is workforce participation rate which is at an all time low

This is the opposite of true - it's not at a historic high, either, but it's climbing. And, it's notable that it blipped back up to as if Covid hadn't happened, which most countries haven't been able to do. (Also worth noting that all this is taking place within a tiny range of 4% on the full size graph; even the "big" Covid dip was only a drop of 3%.)

Unemployment as it's defined on the charts is actually sort of a bad metric, yes. For whatever reason the story picked a bunch of not really all that good metrics (economic expansion, stock market) and then asked people about them. I do think it would have been a much better story if they'd asked about wages instead of these corporate-friendly metrics.

Mexico City loses almost 40 percent of its municipal water to leakage from pipes and canals, one of the highest rates in the world.

Raises hand

Okay so I have a suggestion now

(Yes I know redoing your whole water infrastructure all of a sudden on a dime is basically impossible, but so is living if you don't have anything to drink, so pick your poison I guess)

1. Dude fuck the hill
2. IDK why inflation-adjusted wages at the main quartiles isn't the main metric and the first significant metric everyone looks at. If I had to pick one set of numbers for "the economy," that would be it.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

If only the news would take some time to explain to them what’s going on with the economy and who is stealing their money, the same way they do when immigrants or students are the ones causing a problem