I’m not going to discuss how I feel about you doubling down on “minority rights have always been handed down from above” because I don’t want to get banned, suffice to say I have no interest in discussing anything further with you.

That’s the “crabs-in-a-bucket” approach. We will never get anywhere if we’re willing to sell each other out and tear each other down to get ahead or protect ourselves. I’m never going to sacrifice solidarity with the oppressed in the hopes that our oppressors will be merciful. If I were that much of a coward, I wouldn’t have transitioned in the first place.

You say I will always lose with this path, but you don’t know that. What I do know is that I will always lose following your path. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the only thing that’s guaranteed to fail. Solidarity is the only viable strategy and the only one that makes any logical sense at all. As well as being the only moral position. You wanted to play that card of “look them in the face,” well I could never look a Palestinian in the face and explain why I’m selling them out just to save my own skin. They will level all their slings and arrows against us, but it is still better to stand against them together than to fracture and join them and fight against each other for a momentary respite until they inevitably turn on us.

Claiming that every victory every marginalized group has ever won was just handed down from above by appeasing the rich and powerful is absurd, ahistorical, and offensive.

Oh, I can say it to my own face, I’m trans. But I’ve also told all my trans friends that I’m not voting for Kamala, and have no difficulty doing so. There isn’t a single person in the world I wouldn’t look dead in the eye and say it to.

Your analogy fails to the account for the fact that you’re strengthening the very people who put you in that situation in the first place, so it is not a valid analogy (among many other reasons). You “accounted” for the cause in saying that the city council “failed to fix” the problem. In reality, they intentionally caused the problem, and doing your “triage” empowers them to cause it to happen more and more, neither of which you accounted for at all.

Today, Palestinians are the ones being “triaged.” Tomorrow, it could very well be us. By your calculus, if the democrats decide to throw us under the bus because they see us as too much of an electoral liability, you will still happily accept them as the “lesser evil” and all the arguments you’re using now to support killing Gazans, you will deploy then to support killing us. “The Democrats just want to sacrifice trans people, the Republicans want to go after trans people and gay people and…” Don’t try to pretend you wouldn’t, unless you’re prepared to explain why your “triage” analogy wouldn’t apply there too.

An injury to one is an injury to all. If we don’t stand up for Palestinians, if we allow minorities to be picked off one by one, then we are doomed because there will be no one left to stand up for us.

Meanwhile, you hand a couple more rounds to the sniper that caused the accident in the first place, who is actively and intentionally causing more accidents.

Could do worse tbh.

What’s wild to me is that they actually put out attack ads targeting the Green party, which tells me they’re believing their own propaganda.

immiserated possibly a billion more

Hmm, this graph must be upside-down or something, weird.

Fascists paint themselves as being a third position that supercedes the left-right dichotomy, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually true. Everything about it is right-wing and it’s not actually as incompatible with capitalism as fascists claim. Every fascist regime has partnered up with capitalists, who often support them into power in the first place.

Technicians that will probably demand a commission not a flat rate.

Never heard of anyone in that field doing this. If you walk into a computer repair place and say you need to recover data off a hard drive and they say they need to know how much the data’s worth before they can tell you the cost, you should probably just immediately walk out and go to a different store regardless because that’s probably a skeezy place.

But it isn’t wrong. I’d like it to be wrong, and I can appreciate wanting to shift the Overton window, but that’s not where we are and it won’t change before November.

Cool, so which other groups are acceptable sacrifices for the sake of political convenience?

The rights of any minority are always precarious because the majority has the ability to fuck them over. The only way to protect ourselves is by banding together in solidarity with other vulnerable groups and drawing red lines and treating an attack on one as an attack on all. A group I belong to could very easily be the next in the crosshairs. “We will hang together, or we will hang separately.”

You want to convince me to support a third-party candidate, first we need to put Trump in prison, then we need to roll out Star Voting, and then we need some third-party alternatives that aren’t obvious Russian assets.

Oh, is Star Voting part of Kamala’s platform? Is that listed on her campaign website? Has she talked about it in speeches, rallies, or debates? Has she ever even mentioned it once?

Your plan is, “unconditional support of the Democratic party whether or not they provide any sort of voting reform, until they voluntarily choose to give us voting reform, in direct contradiction of their interests, and if they never do then just unconditional support to the democrats forever.” In other words, talking about voting reform is just a red herring to obfuscate that your actual stance is just unconditional support to the democrats forever.

You know who does support voting reform to make third party candidates more viable? Third party candidates. So if you wanna talk about voting reform, in order for that to happen, we would need to get a third party candidate to win first. Or, alternatively, we could say that our support for Democrats should be conditional on them supporting voting reform, so that when they do their calculations they realize that they need to incorporate that into their platform to have a better chance of winning. Because why on earth would they ever support it otherwise?

Right now, the Dems have decided that supporting Israel gains them more votes than it loses, and they can live with that.

I don’t see how you can say this and still not get it. We’re trying to make sure that this calculation is wrong. Because it’s only if that calculation is wrong that they would have any reason to change their stance. Voting for them regardless would mean that their calculation was easily correct and they should keep making the same calculation in the future. If you aknowledge that such a calculation is being made, then surely you can understand the rationale for making the decision more costly.

Harris will make at least some saber rattling to try to stem the bloodshed

Haaaaahahahhahaaaaahhaahahhaahahhaaahahahahhaaaaaa. That’s the funniest joke I’ve heard in a long time.

If they were actually motivated, they could’ve done something like tying student loan forgiveness to PPP loan forgiveness. Or packing the courts, or at least leveraging that as a threat the way FDR did.

Ultimately, I just don’t believe that the guy who spent decades working towards a right-wing agenda that included making student loans worse and harder to get rid of was actually motivated to do more than a token effort towards forgiveness. There’s this collective delusion that Biden suddenly transformed into an entirely different person the moment he became the nominee. He contributed to the problem because his donors paid him to, then, with the same donors, conveniently failed to address it. And yet somehow this gets trotted out as a point in favor.

I never claimed anything you’re saying. It doesn’t matter how much you repeat it, it doesn’t make it true. Show me where I said that both loans are “equally discharged,” you literally made that up whole cloth.

If you’re going to keep playing these games, we’re done here.

I already explained both of those things.

You gish galloped by throwing down a bunch of one line responses, and then expecting anyone challenging them to put a disproportionate amount of effort into refuting them.

The power play is just transparent. You treated the conversation as an examination or interrogation, with you as the examiner or judge. You were explicitly asking me things not because they were relevant, but to test my knowledge to see if I was qualified to have a conversation with. That’s a rhetorical tactic to establish dominance and control over the conversation. Of course, you never had to prove your knowledge or qualifications, but I do, because you’re the one in charge - or so you tried to frame it.

I never had any issue answering questions that were directly relevant, or with answering your questions after you answered mine, because then there was no assumption of power or authority. I don’t like such games, but I know how to recognize them and play against them.

I note that you still haven’t provided a single specific, a single indication that you know anything about what you’re talking about. It’s clear that you have neither the interest or ability to address any of my actual points. All you have is calling my qualifications into question and trying to to throw around authority that you do not have.

Then start it.

This whole time all you’ve been doing is posturing. You keep talking about the idea of specifics without actually talking about them. You’re trying to pass yourself off as the mature, rational authority and “adult in the room” but you can’t actually back any of it up with evidence.

From the start, you did that power play of interrogating me with random questions to test whether I was “qualified” to your satisfaction to have a discussion. Had I just gone along with it, you would’ve tricked me into acknowledging you as an authority. Now, you’re just trying to act as an authority anyway. I have no interest in that kind of bullshit, you don’t get to pretend to have made a point by playing around with social dynamics, without ever actually making one.

The fact that you’re playing these games tells me that you can’t actually back up anything you’re saying.

You’re the one who brought up student loan forgiveness as something that differentiates the democrats. Personally, I wouldn’t go around bragging about something they failed to deliver on.

I have made my point to my satisfaction. You can go off about whatever vague excuses you want. What I see is that they delivered on loan forgiveness to business owners and investors (and themselves) but not to students. You’ve yet to offer any sort of actual explanation or excuse beyond talking vaguely about how “legislation is hard.”

You wanna talk about the specifics of the legislation, go for it, I’m game. But it’s not my job to bring up excuses for the people I’m criticizing, it’s yours.

The Republicans have been more successful in pursuing their policy agenda and moving discourse to the right in part because of their stubbornness and intransigence. Democrats are always the ones that move further and further right to meet the Republicans where they’re at, and because the Republicans know they’ll do it, they keep moving right themselves. So we reach a point where the party that passes as “left” in this country is actively trying to pass tighter restrictions on immigration, is championing our outrageous military spending and arming a genocide, and is bragging about increasing gas production while placing tariffs on EVs. The strategy of the Republican base of playing hardball and laying down strict red lines on things like abortion or gun control has proven more effective than the strategy of the Democratic base of “lesser-evilism.”

Granted, part of it is that the stuff the Republicans want is generally not directly opposed to corporate interests, so their politicians can give in to their base without upsetting their donors. Democrats have to play a game of not disrupting the profits of their donors while trying to appease the base.

I agree that relief was needed, but PPP loans were basically handouts to people who were already well off. Should’ve just been another stimulus check.

Thank you for asking a question that’s directly relevant and not just some bullshit “test of knowledge.”

I’d like to remind you once again that my “vague talking point repeated all the time with no substance,” was made by the White House.

As for “how, why, and when student loans can be discharged,” those things are all determined by laws passed by Congress. Such as the law Biden voted for which made student loans ineligible for forgiveness through bankruptcy.

Apart from having been a member of Congress for decades and actively making the problem worse, you probably intend to roll out the talking point that the smol bean most powerful man on earth is part of the executive branch and thus has no control over legislation other than the veto. I recall this was one of your “test” questions from earlier. What this neglects is that the president is influential within the party and can and does frequently work with the legislature on bills. There’s a reason why we call it “Obamacare,” even though Obama didn’t formally vote on it because he wasn’t a member of Congress.

What did the democrats get in exchange for PPP loan forgiveness? Maybe they should’ve negotiated harder to include changes to how student loans work as part of that deal. But then, many Democrats as well as Republicans had PPP loans that got forgiven, so I suppose they got something out of the deal.

I can’t believe you actually did it 🤣 You really couldn’t admit that both of our questions were unfair, huh?

PPP loans were loans given out in response to COVID that were intended to help prevent small businesses survive. In reality, they were handed out left and right with little oversight.

They were part of the CARES Act passed under the Trump administration.

They’re not related to student loans except insofar as they’re both government loans (though student loans are generally managed through third parties). The White House seemed to think it was a fair comparison, though.

There were several different pieces of legislation regarding student loans, so you’ll have to be more specific about which effort you’re talking about.

It’s now 4 AM and while I may make questionable choices regarding my sleep schedule and internet arguments, I do need to get some sleep.

If you have any further questions, then be prepared to answer more of mine in exchange.