Haha thanks, call me Rowdy Roddy Piper I guess
mozz
joined 2 years ago
This analysis, I pretty much exactly agree with. That all makes it notable that under Biden they put sanctions on settlers for the first time in history and didn't veto a security council attempt to reign in Israel for the first time I'm aware of.
Is that enough? No. Does it excuse 5 months of exactly what you're describing, is it any help to someone whose child starved to death while Biden was gradually coming around in his own time, does it guarantee that anything will happen in the future that isn't just more of the same grim neoliberal encouragement and funding for the slaughter of the browns? No, no, and no.
Are those still relevant facts, though? Yes. Are you posting all this out of any good well intentioned concern for the well being of the Palestinians, or with consideration of the fact that Trump explicitly wants to go in and finish the genocide instead of this limp-wristed-too-late opposition Biden is giving? That one, only you can answer.
Are you reading my message through some inverted version of those "They Live" sunglasses?
Unsurprisingly, this isn't true.
There's actually a much more accurate fleshing out of analogy that could be made -- helping a friend in a violent situation, and enabling them to do violent criminal things but still trying to stop them once it came to the point of killing, and what crime you'd get charged with for that -- but that construction would lead in the direction of nuance, so juicy doesn't want that.
he should stop doing a genocide.
As soon as he's the one actually doing the genocide, instead of merely continuing long-standing US pro-war-crimes-by-our-allies policy (which, I'll agree, is pretty much war criminal on his part and his weak little baby steps towards maybe not doing it anymore sometime in the theoretical future are not nearly enough)... then I'll agree with this statement. As it is, it's a deliberate distortion.
Of the last 12 articles I've posted, only 3 could be construed as negative towards Biden
Not true.
- OP article, 1 / 1
- Gaza as it pertains to US policy, 1.5 / 2
- Gaza specifically pertaining to Biden and Harris, 2.5 / 3
- Hunter Biden, 3.5 / 4
- Gaza in general, 3.5 / 5
- Hunter Biden, 4.5 / 6
- Robotic police dog, 4.5 / 7
- State Dept employees angry at Biden's policy, 5 / 8
- Same State Dept story reposted, 5.5 / 9
- US threatens PA, with a picture of Biden looking old, 6.5 / 10
- "Dumbasses" from State Dept - 7 / 11
- Online Gambling - 7 / 12
We could quibble about at what point a story about US policy in general counts as a story about Biden; I gave those ones half a point and arrived at 58% of the stories being criticism of Biden with multiple Hunter Biden stories being the red flag. Others might assign the points differently but it bears mentioning that the next three after that were all heavily and explicitly anti-Biden stories (incl. those two laughably slanted ones about Bidenomics.)
Obviously giving Biden grief over his Gaza policy or anything else is completely legitimate; I actually posted the exact same story you did about the State Dept employee angrily resigning, because it's important. But equally obviously, there's a pattern of accounts posting in a very particular way which includes a constant daily drumbeat of more-or-less-subtle anti Biden stories and individual one-off comments like this one without much engagement outside of that, and you're behaving like one of those accounts, and that's worth commenting on. No?
How do you figure? My impression is that most Arab leadership pays some very tame lip-service to Palestine while basically doing fuck-all, but I think that's because any Arab leadership that does more than that suddenly finds itself faced with drone strikes and precision bombing and its internal enemies all of a sudden having all this money-and-weapons support. So the natural selection pressure is inevitably towards the corrupt and inactive current status quo, whatever the starting point was. But that's just my stereotype view; I don't actually know that much about it.
I see the accounts that post about 60% "here's why Biden is bad" articles, and occasional one-off comments about how Biden / "the Dems" are bad, and pretty much not much else, have arrived on Beehaw.
It is not for the followers to buy, although they probably will buy some number of them. It is chiefly a money-laundering vehicle for people to channel money to Trump without it being an official contribution. It is an update to the tactic of mass purchases of conservative-politician books which no one is planning on reading.
I posted an incredibly detailed layout of what I think of this guy's analysis and why I think it's crap, and invited you to talk about it with me if you'd like.
You could have saved yourself some typing just by saying "no, I don't want to do that." You don't need to justify. Cheers as well.
The author is an economics professor.
A lot of economics professors are wrong about a lot of things, famously so.
(Edit: Actually, a better way to say it. If I can find an economics professor or expert who outranks this guy, is more of an expert, who has the opposite opinion, does that cancel out what this guy says? Because that person's an expert? That's the problem with the appeal to authority.)
It gave very clear and cogent reasons old metrics are not reliable any longer.
No it didn't. It gave very clear, cogent, and accurate reasons why these particular metrics (old or not) are sometimes not reliable. It made no effort to justify why they wouldn't be reliable right now or why the reality differs from the indication of the metrics. Just "these metrics are imperfect, therefore the opposite of what they say must be true, QED." Like I say I went into some detail in my other message, if you want to see.
And, the metrics the author tried to promote instead (on the rare occasions he was trying to promote anything in particular) were incredibly more flawed than the ones he was pointing out the limitations of. Again, I went into some detail in my other message.
If you're planning to simply appeal to authority, like "well this guy's a professor so you're not allowed to think his argument is shit even if you can explain in detail why," then we can end our conversation simply agreeing to disagree about how it works.
I'm saying the last couple of years is an illusion. As soon as things get back to normal economically, the inequity will continue its march.
And yes, mid to post pandemic saw rising wages. 1 million+ died, 3.5-4 million retired. When the restrictions loosened up, what was the big problem? "No one wants to work!!!" Because a lot of people took those relief checks and retrained themselves.
So... things will get back to inequality again, as soon as all those people un-retrain themselves, un-retire, and come back to life?
I'm mean, I'm partly kidding; I actually do think people straight-up dying or becoming disabled had a big unrecognized impact in wage growth, yes. But also, supply chain inflation and companies that went bust during the pandemic and didn't come back, put some weight on the scale on the other side.
Biden's policies created 700,000 new manufacturing jobs so far. We raised corporate taxes significantly and then put hundreds of billions of dollars back into domestic industry in a way that was specifically designed to create jobs. It would be weird if the impact of that was 0.
Let me ask this -- if your assertion is that wages rising is just a natural response after Covid killed all these people and made the market tighter (if I've understood you right) -- why hasn't it happened that way in any other first world country within the same time frame? Pretty much all of them except the US have seen wages falling (or, have seen inflation rising fast enough to overpower the slight rise in wage growth).
The author can't present the numbers for the more clear and straightforward metrics you're talking about, because as you noted, they show the exact opposite of what he's trying to imply is happening.
He's constructing the article in such a way as to carefully assemble little individual facts to carefully create a facsimile of something that isn't what's actually happening. For what reason, I honestly don't know. But it's too precisely tailored skirting around the reality for it to be a simple mistake.