mozz

mozz, 4 days ago

My god dude. It doesn't stop.

I came in here to say something cynical about hosting the DNC in Chicago this year like tempting fate, like they want to be out of power for another 24 years afterwards (which may be as long as it takes us to start to have elections again, if Trump wins). Instead I have to deal with this bullshit.

This weird and malicious bill is certainly a heap of shit, but it does nothing even remotely related to making anything illegal. The closest thing is that when investigating instances of discrimination against a Jewish student, the department of education is required to use that definition, so maybe someone who was offended by a Palestine protest could try to twist it around and say that they suffered anti-semitism, and then someone would be required etc etc I don't even really know what the impact is. But nothing is happening to protestors because of this bill (although it is of course a heap of shit, on that we can agree).

Also, it seems that sensible people are trying to kill it; there's no real guarantee that it'll even pass the Senate (although there's also talk of attaching it to something vital like FAA funding to make it tougher for Biden to veto).

Also, and most importantly, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Biden, on any level. It is very clear why you are bringing his name into it, and it has nothing to do with any kind of genuine attempt at communicating a genuine belief about US politics.

mozz, 4 days ago

Except that.. he's the President.. and it for it to become law.. well.. I hope you at least know that little about the US system of law.

I'm just gonna assume that every single person reading this can spot the flaw in your logic here, so I don't need to point it out.

And Biden has also vocally supported the law and said he'll sign it.

When did this happen?

If you are a student, thinking of becoming one, or have any kind of employment with the DOE or employing with funding related to the DOE, this would severely limit the kinds of speech you are allowed to engage in.

Interesting. Are you saying it doesn't make protesting against Israel illegal like you said before? Fascinating. But now you're completely telling the truth about this new version of what it does. Do I have both of those statements correct? I can look up whether you're lying with the new version, if this new thing is your final answer.

mozz, 4 days ago

Are you sure you don't want to commit to some particular version of what you're claiming the bill does? I mean, now that you abandoned the clearly absurd bullshit you said first time around. I'm happy to go and research and see whether you were lying this time around, too.

Or give some kind of citation for the thing where Biden vocally supported the bill and said he'd sign it? That one, I actually looked for a little bit, because I didn't want to look stupid if it was all over the news that he'd actually said that, but I couldn't find anything with a little bit of looking. But it should be pretty easy to show that you weren't talking completely out of your ass on that part, too.

Oops, my bad - I meant to say sorry for gas-lighting. Damn autocomplete. I sure am bad faith. You got me right.

mozz, 4 days ago

Which is about as strong a statement as you'll ever get from the Whitehouse

😃

Okay so he definitely didn't say the thing you specifically said that specifically-he said? And his press secretary didn't say it either, but you decided that something totally different that she said probably meant that she thought it? I just want to double check on this.

mozz, 4 days ago

I knew a guy who rode in a tank in one of America's foreign wars. He said that the original "The Roof is on Fire" was a much-loved thing to play on the sound system in the tank. That and death metal.

mozz, 4 days ago

I think being in an American tank crew that's engaged in picking on some small country that doesn't have satellites or a global supply chain or tons of experience or basically unlimited amounts of materiel or dominant military technology in every area or a coherent plan backed by 200 years of being continuously at war, is a somewhat different experience to driving around a Russian tank getting hunted by little darts in the sky that you can't see but which can swoop in and kill you at any moment. Being in the US military isn't safe, but it's also not equivalent to the generally normal expected military experience worldwide.

If even one US tank gets blown up, it's a big deal. You'll notice that whenever an Abrams or a Patriot battery gets blown up in Ukraine, it makes the news and everyone takes it super seriously -- like whoa, WTF, those are expensive please take care of them how can we make sure that doesn't happen again -- in a way it is not taken all that seriously when Ukrainian people get blown up, which has been happening quite a lot. 😕

mozz, 4 days ago

Maybe trolls depend on the mods being overworked, and so they like to jump on opportunities to be gratuitously dickish to the mods and try to spread hatred and discouragement, to serve their own weird little purposes.

Or IDK, maybe they are just dicks and like being hostile.

mozz, 4 days ago

I am not up for the responsibility of modding, but I'm happy to make a bot for posting once a week about notable upcoming releases that week with good RT scores? Or is that too spammy in nature to be a good idea to do?

mozz, 4 days ago

So there are three urgent problems with immigration in this country, two of which root back to a sudden wild spike upwards in the number of people coming into the country which wasn't matched by a corresponding spike in the resources for the agencies that deal with them:

1. The agency which runs the border patrol and immigration is made of oppressive and racist people
2. There's a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons (see point #1)
3. We're rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #2), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it's fuckin dangerous

Biden is unable to fix #1 without an act of God (basically firing all existing ICE and CBP agents and then finding 45,000 people who really want to work as immigration police but who aren't racist or oppressive). He's unable to fix #2 or #3, although those ones do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don't wait for a year before their case is heard).

And, any time he tries to do anything about it (e.g. try to increase the number of deportations or increase ICE resources, both of which are actually things that would help reduce the suffering from its current state), everyone on the left yells at him, because US immigration is cruel and interacting with it involves interacting with a cruel system.

I would ask ozma the same thing I asked about marijuana policy: What exactly should Biden do to fix the situation? Without resorting to magical solutions like "make ICE not racist" or "just fix the backlog without congress" or just making wild assertions like "oh he could fix it if he wanted to, he just doesn't want to" or similar things that aren't how the federal government works?

I'm open to almost anything; I'm happy to talk about details or exact things or policies, as long as it's grounded in "X and Y are policies he could realistically do and here is how it would help." But if it's just yelling and asserting that he is cruel and he could fix it if he wanted and he's a bad man because US immigration is cruel (which, it certainly is, famously so) and that's all his fault, I'm not into that conversation.

mozz, 4 days ago

Oh, I know. Trust me, I know. I just want to (a) answer krashmo's pretty reasonable question (b) have ozma's refusal to answer my question to be able to refer to in the future, to make the point to other people, when he inevitably posts this bad-faith bullshit a few times a week every week from now until the election.

mozz, 4 days ago

Hey, it's your catch phrase! Bad news though, I made a little histogram, and it's not catching on. There was a huge spike back around the 20th of May when you and a few other people made a concerted effort to start using it, but it dwindled back down to like a few times a week again since then.

I think you should start inserting it into the discourse some more. It's sure to catch on. Just keep repeating it! Don't get discouraged if people make fun of you for it.

mozz, 4 days ago

Okay, so this is an example of why I think you're some sort of fake leftist. You've said this exact thing to me earlier and I didn't really dwell on it all that much -- but it is very bizarre for a supposedly far-left person to hold up CNN as a trusted source. Almost everyone on the left in the US regards CNN as corporate garbage.

The time before, you actually were arguing with me when I was criticizing a CNN article I think, something like you don't know how much more liberal it can get than CNN and you don't see why I would question it, which I interpreted as one of those accidental big slip-ups where the mask comes off a little bit. Maybe I am wrong in that, of course. Surely there are people on the left who for whatever reason trust CNN. But I think the ones of them that are also rabidly anti-establishment-Democrat are probably a lot more rare than you realize. It struck me as much more a statement that would come from someone outside the left, who was accidentally using their own viewpoint on CNN (that it's "liberal") and not the fake leftist view they were supposed to be using.

But yes, CNN criticizing Biden on immigration means more or less nothing. I actually talked a little more at length -- I think with you -- about the ACLU's criticism of him, which although I would take a lot more seriously I also don't agree with, and I explained some of the reasons why. But, predictably, you ignored it and just went back to repeating over and over again that Biden is bad on immigration.

mozz, 4 days ago

Wow. That's crazy. Wow. Yeah, cool cool.

Anyway, what should Biden do to fix immigration?

mozz, 4 days ago

Dude I'm fuckin trying 🥲. Immigration is the one of the bad-faith criticisms that really gets under my skin because it is personal to me in a couple different ways, and this thread is absolutely filled with people who are talking pure bullshit about it for malicious reasons.

Anyway I am happy if you found my input to be useful. I'm gonna go back to just pretending this tide of total crap isn't washing around the rest of the thread and restrain myself from spending the rest of my night typing hostile and condescending replies to it all.

mozz, 4 days ago

Well I mean what else is he supposed to say 😃. Honestly he played it off pretty well; I think trying to argue the point definitely wouldn't have been a smart thing to try to do.

(The one from this thread was just a little off kilter, honestly. The thing from before where he was surprised that I, a left person, would ever have anything bad to say about CNN, since after all it is liberal -- that was super weird. I was just reminded of it when he did a lesser version of it here.)

mozz, 4 days ago

Yeah, but ozma specifically claims to be far left -- like so much so that he can't stand any establishment Democrat, as far as I can tell, even Joe Biden who's significantly more left than the normal (fairly depressing) Democratic standard. That's the only thing that makes it incongruous. Along with getting confused that anyone else from the far-left (as he claims to be) would ever criticize CNN, because after all, it's liberal.

I don't actually agree with calling ozma a Russian or corporate troll. It is extremely clear to me and most other people here that he's some sort of bad-faith mass poster of disinformation. But yeah, for myself I don't tend to throw out accusations of particular nationalities or anything like that, because the truth is that none of us have any idea. Sometimes there will be some poster who has a weird and entertaining confluence of ideas that don't really belong together that involve some particular nation, and so it's not hard to figure out, but ozma's not that. He's all "no Biden" all the time, with a 40% mixture of random other generic-leftist topics to attempt a fig-leaf of being just a normal poster.

Honestly he just irritated me by starting it up as far as immigration. I'm honestly a little surprised that he's still doing this, since as far as I can tell the result most of the time is just to tee up people to be able to downvote him and talk good things about Joe Biden in a way that would be weird if they just came from nowhere and said "IT'S NOT HIS FAULT IMMIGRATION IS SUCH A MESS RIGHT NOW." But IDK; maybe the posting of the constant memes and repetition and purely putting it out there is doing some good things for his objectives. Kind of like pushing junk climate science so there will be a "debate" in the public perception instead of "yes of course it's fucking real why is this even a question."

mozz, 4 days ago

And he's not even a good option.

Oh, boy! I love when people say this.

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 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 motivated by something else

Also there's student loan forgiveness, 15% minimum corporate tax, 7% increase in wages at the bottom end as compared with inflation even when inflation is at historic levels, NLRB providing legal backing for union activity for the first time in quite a while

I have a few others on the list. The news talks about a bunch of weird bullshit so the fact that all of that happened is virtually unknown in this country. Doesn't mean it didn't happen, though.

mozz, 4 days ago

That's a great point! Biden did finally take something resembling urgent action on climate change, which is the first time a US president has ever done that. He tried for a lot more, but what he was actually able to get through the congress (which took quite a bit of doing) was putting the US on track for a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030.

It's a super relevant part of his record, and increases by a significant amount the change that we'll get to continue to exist on the earth in 100 years (although there's about 10 times more work that is needed and even than it's not certain). With as little time as we have left (basically, none), Trump would be an existential catastrophe to the entire human race, and would be even if his opponent wasn't actually accomplishing an unprecedented level of progress on the issue.

It's a good point, and I'm glad you brought it up.

mozz, 4 days ago

Blah blah NLRB

mozz, 4 days ago

Wasn’t intending it as any kind of negative thing, just giving more of the info, since you provided some which I thought was a good idea

mozz, 4 days ago

Yeah. You can actually look at the timeline, and there was an extensive debate inside Ukraine about whether or not they should make any kind of attempt at NATO, with the "not" side being initially pretty strong, and for pretty much exactly the reason you'd expect. And then, every time Russia did some unprovoked horrifying military aggression nearby or directly to them, the eagerness for NATO within Ukraine got a lot greater, until at this point, they and the West are both firmly in favor of it once things stabilize to a non-WW3 level of safety to do that.

The whole "Russia responded after the West tried to get Ukraine into NATO, which Ukraine had no independent desire for" thing is backwards in two whole separate different ways.

mozz, 4 days ago

I mean you can expect whatever you want.

As commonly happens, step 1 "I AM STRONG, I SHALL DO AS I LIKE, FUCK YOU, WHAT YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT" has progressed by step 3-4 into "However could you be so rude, this is definitely not allowed, won't someone think of the rules and how unfair it is that this is happening to me?" I honestly don't know why that exists as a general rule but it is definitely a noticeable pattern in the world.

mozz, 4 days ago

one interaction with a cop and the legal system from destroying my life

Uhhhhh

I have bad news for you about the USSR

Every system has good and bad, and the US is so bad at so many things that most industrialized countries do for their citizens no problem, that I would never be the one to say it doesn't need radical improvement. And I really do (truly) get what you mean about living in a non-capitalist society and the wonderful things about the system just taking care of you (which it doesn't in the US). But at the same time, "needs were taken care of" and "don't live in fear" are two things that are very very far away from what was the stable reality of living in the Soviet Union.

mozz, 4 days ago

Have we had run-ins?

IDK, other than his absolutely war-criminal support for Israel I'm not aware of all that much about Biden that is real ammunition. (Not that that's a minor issue 😢) Pretty much everything else has crumbled into weird half-truths and propaganda when I've been poking at it, I think; what were you thinking of when saying he's doing egregious stuff?

I also don't think that refusing to vote for Biden is going to make anything any better. If someone is doing direct action to change things, or an influence campaign to try to push him to the left, that all sounds frickin fantastic. Just committing to not voting doesn't really make sense to me though -- it's functionally the same as saying you'll vote for Biden no matter what; i.e. basically no pressure at all to change his policy (but with the added horrifying danger of maybe electing Trump.)

mozz, 4 days ago

You can join the conversation here where I talk a little more about the background of that decision -- because it came up over there, I looked it up, and migrants are currently waiting years for their cases to be heard (just to put some facts behind what I was saying in that comment).