mozz

I think you might be onto something 🙂

what is this "move to decriminalization"?

Just appoint a head of the DEA who won't arrest people for pot and pardon everyone in prison for possession/distribution. He chooses to allow the violence of criminalization to continue.

You know he already pardoned everyone who was in federal prison for simple possession, 2 years ago, right?

And told the DEA to reschedule it

And passed a bill for full federal legalization, which the Republicans defeated in the senate?

We saw how much unilateral power the executive has under trump.

Yes, Trump famously got everything he wanted. Ukraine never got their military aid that he tried to block, and the Department of Justice famously bent to his every whim and prosecuted his political opponents when he kept ordering them to. I remember it well.

We see how capable the democrats are of whipping the vote when it's funding to bomb foreigners or lock them in cages.

This is actually the most heinously dishonest of the things you've been saying but I have become discouraged and don't want to spend too much more time researching and illustrating why this is all wrong.

Family separation at the border was already dead when Biden took office; it only ran for about a year in the middle of his presidency. But Biden did start the task force to find the kids' families and reunite them. The flow of immigrant children was quite literally in the exact opposite direction of what you're saying under Biden: From being imprisoned in cages to being back with their families. Look up your own citation for it, I'm getting genuinely irritated that I have to spend time talking about this.

We can tell Trump that's what he means, and see if he starts referring to it that way in his speeches

I am gonna use this thread as a testbed for a little AI moderation tool for observing who is operating in good faith within the discussion.

I've given you a little constructive criticism on your overall debate strategy in one of the other threads, if you're interested to hear it.

He does just enough to mollify you while with the other hand funneling money into corporations.

As with a lot of things you're saying, this one seems to be simply made up. The reality is actually the complete opposite -- Biden is spending literally trillions of dollars on things like the climate bill and student loan forgiveness, and funding it by raising taxes on corporations. His budget for 2025 is set to do more of the same. By way of example, Amazon went from having a $1.2 billion tax credit to now paying $3 billion per quarter after Biden's 2022 corporate tax reforms.

Now I think it's you being a bit ridiculous. By that logic, no American can ever legitimately criticize a Presidency.

That's fair. I wasn't trying to say "you can't criticize the president because you're not in that position," but that is sorta what I said, and that's a little ridiculous, you're right.

What I was meaning to say has one important caveat though, see: So on overall greenhouse gas emissions, and on overall amount of money forgiven on student loans, Biden has a great record. The total number of tons and total number of dollars is moving more significantly in the right direction than anyone else who's ever been president. And, he objectively tried to do a lot more than he did, but had to pare it back because other powerful people in government told him no. All of that is a little hard for FuglyDuck to directly argue against, because it's... well, it's true. So he's doing a little rhetorical dodge where he picks some element that's one small-minority piece of the whole issue, and says if Biden really cared about student loans or climate or whatever, he'd have done this piece in a different fashion. So clearly he's doing damage on purpose and we need to not vote for him.

It's honestly a pretty solid strategy for FuglyDuck to focus in on single issues like that, because I don't really know the issues well enough to say he's wrong. So what I'm saying instead is, look, Biden achieved objectively a good overall record on this issue. To pick out some piece of his overall big picture and say, sure he's winning the game, but he obviously doesn't really care, or else this minority piece would be different, to me isn't reasonable.

It'd be different if FuglyDuck was saying "Sure, Biden achieved a significant success with the climate bill, but I still think he fucked up on decision X." That shows he's in it for some honest purpose even if he and I disagree on some details. The fact that he ignores me repeatedly when I'm referring to the bigger picture, and keeps insisting the individual issues are the only things that matter (and only the ones that happen to line up with his overall narrative), makes me a lot less trusting of the overall "Biden hates the climate" picture he seems to be trying to paint.

I love how he throws that out like some kind of gotcha 😃

I mean, I think what he's trying to say is a little more coherent argument: That Biden's doing it wrong, and should be reforming the student loan services instead of doing programs to explicitly forgive portions of debt for specific borrowers. In which case my question would be this: The scorecard for this week is:

• Biden: Gave $6 billion loan relief
• FuglyDuck: Gave $0 loan relief

So it seems weird if FuglyDuck is giving Biden feedback on what is the right way to give student loan relief, like Biden's just fucking it up when it's so obvious that if FuglyDuck could get in there he could set everything right with a different approach. As we all know, getting big new things done in government is actually super simple.

Like Mike Pompeo said, “There will be a very smooth transition to a second Biden Presidency…”

I forgot about this horseshit

Mostly by corporate subsidies for things they were either already doing or wanting to do.

This statement is, as far as I can tell, simply made up. Here's a quantitative comparison of what they were already doing or wanting to do, versus the plan after the climate bill.

Simply removing government subsidies from oil would be very nearly sufficient to that end, too.

Good luck with that. Pop quiz: Which industry gives a fuck of a lot of money to congress? Follow-up question, in order for something that's a good idea to become law, does it have to (a) go through congress or (b) nothing further, being president means you get everything you want with no other branch of government involved?

It's common knowledge that the climate bill is not nearly enough action. But, it's also clear to me looking at it that (a) it was extremely impressive to be able to get that amount of climate improvement through the current US government to become law, and (b) giving Biden shit for it because the rest of government blocked him from doing more, seems almost guaranteed to weaken his ability (or anyone else's) to do more with a second term.

This whole mythology that "well we have to give Biden a hard time over the climate, because he's already attempting to do a lot but more action is needed, and if Trump wins and reverses every small bit of progress anyone's been able to make then that's just the price of environmental success" is, to me, not very sensible. It's like shooting allied soldiers to help win World War 2. It's like not bringing a parachute because you're really really sure you don't want your plane to crash. It doesn't make any fucking sense.

he -personally- approved the willow project permits

Here's a good summary of why he might have done that.

To me, "does he care about the climate?" boils down to, what has he done for the climate, and the best way to measure that is with the emissions impacts of his actions.

Doing more and blocking more development projects on top of that sounds like a great idea, yes.

The vast majority of which should have been forgiven decades ago, and wasn’t because of scammy loan services.

Glad we're in agreement that it's good to have an American president who's finally doing good things instead of just neoliberal horror! Yes, it's nice. I would like to see more of these things happen.

There’s an easy rule of thumb you can use to answer this type of question.

Will the people with money have less?

If so, it’s illegal. Other way around is fine for some reason.

30,000 unrelated people had their data handed over to the government

It doesn't say it happened. It said Google received a court order. People challenge court orders sometimes, there's just a process you have to go through to do it.

The whole article is honestly just weird. E.g. "Privacy experts from multiple civil rights groups told Forbes they think the orders are unconstitutional because they threaten to turn innocent YouTube viewers into criminal suspects." That is... that's not what "unconstitutional" means at all. Sometimes cops will question innocent people or knock on doors when they're investigating crimes. If they're doing it without court oversight, that's dangerous. If "crimes" include things that aren't actually crimes, that's dangerous. If "knocking on doors" includes more than just actually asking questions to investigate, that's dangerous. But I'm a little doubtful that they showed up at anyone's door just because that person watched a YouTube video and started asking them questions related or unrelated to the specific crime they were investigating.

The article's written in a way where you genuinely can't tell some important details -- they don't say whether the video was public or unlisted, they don't say whether the cops were the ones that uploaded it, there are important things like that that they don't make clear. But the idea that the constitution says the cops can't gather data under any circumstances to investigate a crime seems like just a knee-jerk "cops bad" reaction.

I don't even necessarily disagree with your broader point. If the cops took a publicly-listed YouTube video and asked a court for the identities of 30,000 people who happened to watch it, and then the court agreed, and then Google gave them the data instead of pushing back legally (which the article claims they do sometimes), then sure, that's wrong. But literally every one of those elements is unclear from the article whether it happened.

there's nothing stopping cops from getting all of our data

At the end of the article is an instance where the cops went to the court for a "geofencing" warrant and the court threw out their request because it was too broad. That's the point of oversight and why having to get a warrant is an important step.

Like I say I'm honestly not completely disagreeing with you here. I definitely think too much data gets harvested about what every person does online and the cops are too freely able to access it with too little oversight. Depending on the details, maybe that's what happened here, or maybe it was legit. I'm just saying I'm don't agree with the assertion that it's always wrong.

I originally interpreted it the way you're saying... I think it's actually worse, I think they deliberately put it out to shit on the idea of socialism by setting up the rules in a way that makes it look like a bad idea.

There are games that are genuinely designed to teach socialism. Class Struggle is one. Another was... well, The Landlord's Game.