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.
Now I think it’s you being a bit ridiculous. By that logic, no American can ever legitimately criticize a Presidency.
There are reasons why Biden didn’t take other approaches available to him, and they aren’t laudable ones. His donors don’t want a precedent set that would make it easy for a future president to relieve even more debt.
Biden gets credit for what he has done, but ultimately the limit comes from what the establishment negotiates with the banks. It’s way past time for leadership that will remind the banks that they weren’t the ones elected.
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.
Now I think it’s you being a bit ridiculous. By that logic, no American can ever legitimately criticize a Presidency.
By all means criticize but don’t make it sound like he’s completely ineffective or gutless because he couldn’t squeeze out more given the extreme levels of obstruction from Congress and the clear conservative bias in the SCOTUS.
This has been a known problem for two or three decades
And Biden wasn’t President for two or three decades.
he’s taken almost zero action to actually resolve the problem
Funny how you people started pitching a fit whenever anyone suggested reforming tuition rather than one-time handouts. But now that Biden has actually started doing the handouts, now you’re pitching a fit that he isn’t reforming tuition.
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
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.
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.
I am not a mod here; I think you have me confused with someone else. Have I given you the impression that I’m unable to argue for myself without resorting to asserting some sort of authority? I actually think this kind of disagreement is good for the discourse; I just think it would also be good to have a separate place that wasn’t subject to shouty bad faith people clogging up the comments in quite so high a number.
It’s like slapping a tourniquet on an arterial laceration
Your whole student loan analysis I’ll more or less agree with overall, and to some extent with its application to other domains. I do think if someone’s artery is cut that you should usually put a tourniquet on. It seems like Biden’s been putting tourniquets on, and the other group has been trying to fistfight him for doing even that much, and trying to go through the accident victim’s pockets and threatening bystanders. And they have weapons. And, somehow, he managed to get some important tourniquets on even so.
You’re making a completely valid presentation of why the patient isn’t yet “fine” after the tourniquet. But going further from there to “I don’t see why I should support the tourniquet guy over the give-me-his-wallet-and-empty-your-own-pockets-while-we’re-at-it people” doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Biden’s best move on climate was a subtle one that went almost unnoticed. The Democrats quietly slipped language into the inflation reduction act that reclassified CO2 as a pollutant, thus restoring the ability for the EPA to regulate it that has been stripped by the Supreme Court. That’s Republican level hardball that we almost never see from the Democrats.
LOL, read my post again. My entire point was that Biden used a clever ploy to give control back to the EPA after the SC killed it. Making CO2 a pollutant bypasses that ruling.
I joked elsewhere that I would like to mess around with a little AI moderation bot that tries to go beyond “is this racism” and into whether something is actually a productive part of the conversation.
I actually started messing around with such a thing tonight, no real idea whether it’ll come to anything. But I thought you should know that it particularly liked this comment. “A clarification of their previous point in a concise and clear manner. It refrains from personal attacks, engages with the substance of the discussion, and … maintains a respectful tone and effectively contributes to the discourse.”
I’ve been so far resisting the incredibly childish urge to tell people I’ve been disagreeing with that the bot thinks they are wrong. What’s the point. I will however tell you that it roasted FuglyDuck for his accusation of ad hominem being, itself, ad hominem (spending half his message saying he’s not the guy who is X Y Z, instead of just talking about the subject matter).
You made a bot that tells you you’re good at arguing and other people are bad and wrong? Very normal and productive behaviour. Not a tool to reinforce your beliefs.
You sound like Donald Trump getting all upset on Truth Social that someone’s subjecting his actions to legal scrutiny, when he should be able to go around being bullshit and lying and it’s some incredible breach of justice if someone tries to tell him that he shouldn’t.
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Yet it wasn’t until this Presidency.
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:
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.
Now I think it’s you being a bit ridiculous. By that logic, no American can ever legitimately criticize a Presidency.
There are reasons why Biden didn’t take other approaches available to him, and they aren’t laudable ones. His donors don’t want a precedent set that would make it easy for a future president to relieve even more debt.
Biden gets credit for what he has done, but ultimately the limit comes from what the establishment negotiates with the banks. It’s way past time for leadership that will remind the banks that they weren’t the ones elected.
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 think we are in agreement. I don’t believe FuglyDuck is commenting on good faith.
I think you might be onto something 🙂
By all means criticize but don’t make it sound like he’s completely ineffective or gutless because he couldn’t squeeze out more given the extreme levels of obstruction from Congress and the clear conservative bias in the SCOTUS.
It wasn’t me doing that.
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And Biden wasn’t President for two or three decades.
Funny how you people started pitching a fit whenever anyone suggested reforming tuition rather than one-time handouts. But now that Biden has actually started doing the handouts, now you’re pitching a fit that he isn’t reforming tuition.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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I am not a mod here; I think you have me confused with someone else. Have I given you the impression that I’m unable to argue for myself without resorting to asserting some sort of authority? I actually think this kind of disagreement is good for the discourse; I just think it would also be good to have a separate place that wasn’t subject to shouty bad faith people clogging up the comments in quite so high a number.
Your whole student loan analysis I’ll more or less agree with overall, and to some extent with its application to other domains. I do think if someone’s artery is cut that you should usually put a tourniquet on. It seems like Biden’s been putting tourniquets on, and the other group has been trying to fistfight him for doing even that much, and trying to go through the accident victim’s pockets and threatening bystanders. And they have weapons. And, somehow, he managed to get some important tourniquets on even so.
You’re making a completely valid presentation of why the patient isn’t yet “fine” after the tourniquet. But going further from there to “I don’t see why I should support the tourniquet guy over the give-me-his-wallet-and-empty-your-own-pockets-while-we’re-at-it people” doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
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Biden’s best move on climate was a subtle one that went almost unnoticed. The Democrats quietly slipped language into the inflation reduction act that reclassified CO2 as a pollutant, thus restoring the ability for the EPA to regulate it that has been stripped by the Supreme Court. That’s Republican level hardball that we almost never see from the Democrats.
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They had almost zero power. That is no longer true, and you have no idea what you are talking about. Furthermore, I don’t think you even care.
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LOL, read my post again. My entire point was that Biden used a clever ploy to give control back to the EPA after the SC killed it. Making CO2 a pollutant bypasses that ruling.
I joked elsewhere that I would like to mess around with a little AI moderation bot that tries to go beyond “is this racism” and into whether something is actually a productive part of the conversation.
I actually started messing around with such a thing tonight, no real idea whether it’ll come to anything. But I thought you should know that it particularly liked this comment. “A clarification of their previous point in a concise and clear manner. It refrains from personal attacks, engages with the substance of the discussion, and … maintains a respectful tone and effectively contributes to the discourse.”
I’ve been so far resisting the incredibly childish urge to tell people I’ve been disagreeing with that the bot thinks they are wrong. What’s the point. I will however tell you that it roasted FuglyDuck for his accusation of ad hominem being, itself, ad hominem (spending half his message saying he’s not the guy who is X Y Z, instead of just talking about the subject matter).
Sounds like an actually useful bot!
You made a bot that tells you you’re good at arguing and other people are bad and wrong? Very normal and productive behaviour. Not a tool to reinforce your beliefs.
You sound like Donald Trump getting all upset on Truth Social that someone’s subjecting his actions to legal scrutiny, when he should be able to go around being bullshit and lying and it’s some incredible breach of justice if someone tries to tell him that he shouldn’t.
Do you believe the EPA is powerless?
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proceeds to blame Biden anyway
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Right, those climate subsidies that went only to corporations …… as I drive my EV that I could afford because of the government incentive
tl;dr Biden will lose because he’s not FDR.