mozz Admin

mozz Admin , 1 hour ago to NonCredibleDefense in Oh, good, I almost had an independent thought

I mean it can be both (broadly speaking). NATO loves expanding and broadening the strength of its alliance, weakening a geopolitical enemy, opening up new markets for their shiny shiny weapons, and provoking a little low-level conflict to keep everyone alert and stay on top of new tactical developments now that the landscape of war is changing.

But also, holding Russia at bay is a necessary noble thing to do, and all these breakaway republics are acting out of pure self preservation necessity when they join an alliance that will bloody Russia's nose for them if they get messed with.

mozz Admin , 1 hour ago (edited 1 hour ago) to politics in The Biden Campaign Has a Trump-Fatigue Problem

But he is continuing to supply genocidal fascists

True

he isn't being aggressive on climate

Absolutely 100% false, I talked about it somewhere else in the thread

is reserving harsher rhetoric (and I'm interested to see if he ups the ante) for the ICC

True 🙁. Someone asked (edit: Michael) Matthew Miller yesterday more or less "So are you saying you're going to do something about it?" and his answer was more or less, no comment.

most of his economic wins aren't helping lower middle class income and less

Absolutely false. The majority of his wage gains have been at the bottom end -- I don't remember exactly but it's something like 35% cumulative gain in wages at the 10th percentile, almost but not completely eaten up by 25% cumulative inflation. It's something like that, those aren't the exact numbers. I think wage gain at the 10th percentile is invisible to the majority of Lemmy users (esp. since wages at the top e.g. tech jobs actually haven't kept pace with inflation) -- but a lot of the wage gains are direct results of his policies, whereas the inflation is a global thing which is largely Covid follow-ons and corporate greed.

I'm still paying as much for 3 lbs of frozen vegetables as about the same costs of chicken of equal proportion, and a loaf of half-decent bread is as much as a tomato and package of cheese. We won't discuss eggs and milk.

Yeah. Talking about inflation -- especially inflation at the grocery store -- is a super effective talking point, because it's real, it hurts people, and then if someone comes back and says "ok yes but that's not Biden's fault and he's actually been doing enough good stuff that for the really vulnerable people, they're actually in a better place than they were, even with inflation, here look at this chart," they sound like an unsympathetic ass. And yet: That's not Biden's fault and he's actually been doing enough good stuff that for the really vulnerable people, they're actually in a better place than they were. Here, look at this chart.

mozz Admin , 1 hour ago to US Authoritarianism in The Progressive Movement as Illustrated by Calvin and Hobbes

But it winds up having to misrepresent both the Republicans and Calvin’s dad in order to bring the two together which means it’s just wrong.

Like if that whole bottom panel wasn’t there, and it was just the Democrats talking with the actual left wing people, it would already be complete and I think it would be pretty accurate.

mozz Admin , 2 hours ago to politics in The Biden Campaign Has a Trump-Fatigue Problem

Welllllllllll

Biden took half a trillion dollars’ worth of action on climate change which he funded by taxing Amazon + friends which ticked emissions down to 40% reduction by 2030 which is way too late and nowhere near enough no but he started working on it the instant he got in office and had to do the whole thing twice because Manchin blew up the first much more aggressive one at the last minute so yes we need to do a hell of a lot more but it seems weird to pick out the ONE guy in American government who has achieved ANY level of forward progress and give him and only him criticism about how important is climate change and we can’t possibly elect him especially since the other guy wants to undo even that step and start blowing up the planet even harder which makes me question a little bit whether you REALLY care about climate change or whether your explicit targeting of the one guy who made some progress on it is maybe

🎶

Just maybe

Focused and directed in service of an agenda which is maybe

🎶

Maybe just maybe NOT

🎶

Aligned with solving climate change

🎶🎶🎶

Especially given the fact that you seem totally uninterested in conversations about solving climate change which do NOT lead in direct and immediate A->B fashion into not voting for Joe Biden

mozz Admin , 2 hours ago to politics in The Biden Campaign Has a Trump-Fatigue Problem

So there’s a really interesting thing that happens with those polls.

If you ask people how the country’s economy is doing, they say it is in the toilet. But, if you ask them how their state is doing compared to that national average, they say it’s well above average.

There are a few different ways to interpret that, but one obvious one is that the situation they can directly observe isn’t as grim as what they see on the news, and so they assume that something weird happened, and the country is terrible (because they trust the news, or memes, or their friends’ Facebook posts, or whatever gives them their information) — BUT that they don’t see it reflected firsthand, because their environment is beating the average.

There are other interpretations of course. It’s impossible to really say. And that is the problem with trying to use indirect qualitative measures to sort out how the economy is doing; you can always (as you did) reframe it into some un-falsifiable emotion based construction that leads only to one inevitable conclusion (things are bad and it’s all Biden’s fault and if you try to tell me numbers for why it’s not, then that makes it his fault even harder). But, I would still assert that measuring the numbers actually is a good way to see what’s happening.

mozz Admin , 2 hours ago to politics in The Biden Campaign Has a Trump-Fatigue Problem

Be more aggressive with climate policy, we’re already late and can’t dilly-dally anymore.

Wellllllllll

mozz Admin , 2 hours ago to Political Memes in Disclose, divest, we will not stop we will not rest

Yeah, fair enough. I still like some individuals who have (R) after their names but I won’t really argue with you that anyone who’s still a Republican politician at this point is okay with the Nazis coming to power, and having them in office will help it happen a little bit.

mozz Admin , 2 hours ago to Political Memes in Disclose, divest, we will not stop we will not rest

Yeah. I was gonna say, I wouldn’t really agree with the first one but all the rest of them sound great. There needs to be a final panel where 3/4 of the little neon blue people are setting off to start to get some shit done.

mozz Admin , 2 hours ago to politics in The Biden Campaign Has a Trump-Fatigue Problem

I watched most of his speech to the NAACP, after verifying that you were right about him saying he was VP during Covid and it was just as bad as it sounded. He did mention the fact that Trump would be an objective catastrophe and that’s relevant, but I think people already know that; he actually spent most of the speech talking about what he’s done, which I think an overwhelming majority have no idea about beyond a handful of anecdotes. It’s actually so out of line with the popular perception that when he talks about his record (a lot of the same stuff I keep talking about here), it sounds weird and outlandish and comical because a lot of people just have never even heard of it before.

I actually don’t think his campaign is depending mostly on “but Trump,” although I haven’t kept close tabs on it. Are you sure you’re not engaged in an effort to shift the blame for his poor performance onto some tactical failures in his camp whether real or imagined, as opposed to the news media which is overwhelmingly lazy and irresponsible at best, and at worst actively working to undermine him at every turn?

mozz Admin , 3 hours ago to politics in The Biden Campaign Has a Trump-Fatigue Problem

I read the first little bit. My thoughts are that it would be nice if the article painted this whole issue as a media issue instead of a what-Biden-should-do-better issue. It’s not like they’re wrong in anything they’re saying, but leaving out the WHY aspect of how the average voter is so badly misinformed, leaving room for the reader to conclude that Biden’s campaign just isn’t doing a good job in an otherwise neutral situation, seems like a notable omission.

mozz Admin , 4 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago) to politics in California blew it on bail reform. Now Illinois is showing it works.

Yeah.

Media for free has produced a system where the only sustainable business model is producing, effectively, propaganda for people who have a bunch of spare cash lying around and want to invest in your media if you're willing to promote their narrative.

At the same time, the tools of constructing an imaginary worldview and convincing your viewers / readers that that imaginary reality is what's going on have gotten incredibly more powerful. And there's a huge incentive to do it, because if you can do it well enough you can win elections and gain access to a river of money that is literally billions of dollars.

It would be weird if there weren't a bunch of people walking around with this weird constructed narrative in their heads that they think is reality. But it's still super jarring when you run into them and their picture has some kind of confluence with the actual real world and you can see how wrong it is in reality.

mozz Admin , 5 hours ago to U.S. News in “Are You Staring Me Down?”: Judge Merchan Becomes an Oddity in his Own Courtroom

Below is my column in the New York Post

Fascinating

In a trial careening out of control, Judge Juan Merchan seemed to be furiously working to just get the matter to the jury as fast as possible. Judge Merchan seems in open denial of the legal farce playing out in his courtroom.

Tell me more

Even CNN hosts and experts have admitted that this case would never have been brought against another defendant or in another district.

Wow, that's crazy

Judge Merchan continues to allow the jury to hear references to campaign-finance violations that do not exist.

Yeah?

mozz Admin , 5 hours ago to Political Memes in The existence of one doesn't erase the existence of the other

convoluted non-standard

Umberto Eco's description of ur-Fascism is widely accepted as the most complete and accurate definition that exists.

There are plenty of bad things in the world that aren't fascism. But if you want a detailed description of this one specific bad thing, how it operates and why it's dangerous, this is it.

This is like someone saying Noam Chomsky wrote about a convoluted and non-standard version of western imperialism.

mozz Admin , 6 hours ago to politics in Biden’s Marijuana Policies Help Business But Not the Victims of the War on Drugs

Except those victims who were in federal prison for possession who are now all free. Those victims, I think it helps significantly.

As the article notes, Kamela Harris has come out in favor of big marijuana reforms. Also, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act already passed the house in 2022. I honestly don't know what happened that it died in the Senate or why it didn't go anywhere, but do you know anything about Biden being specifically responsible for that?

Some other context about the CAOA:

But despite support from top Democrats, the legislation is highly unlikely to move in Congress during this election year. Republicans, many of whom have opposed federal cannabis legalization, control the House, and none have signed on to the bill. Congress has also labored to perform even the most basic duties of governance amid deep divisions within the Republican majority in the House. And few must-pass bills remain, leaving proponents without many opportunities to slip it into a bigger legislative package.

It's honestly a little bit weird that this story, which the natural packaging of would be "Hey here are a bunch of Democrats working again on getting marijuana federally legal, which is apropos because some more minor things Biden did to loosen marijuana laws are just now coming to pass", is being packaged as "HERE'S HOW BIDEN IS FUCKING US ON MARIJUANA AGAIN".

mozz Admin , 6 hours ago to politics in Biden’s Marijuana Policies Help Business But Not the Victims of the War on Drugs

IDK if ozma is Russian specifically, but I am sure that you are a troll. Whether home-grown for your own entertainment or as a propaganda effort, I have no idea. But you really want people to vote for Biden, and you really support Israel in their "war" because Palestine is the bad guys, and you're vocal about both.

Outlandishly attacking one of the most publicly known propaganda accounts to give yourself some surface credibility sort of tilts it in favor of you being a propaganda-bot, since it doesn't seem like a real entertaining stance to take on its own or likely to upset anybody.