#plenty I don't like about this administration; but fuck if they didn't just deliver for me on this promise

[medicinemane]

So... I hadn't checked for a while cause I knew the government was covering my $0 a month income ass with the SAVE program (which I've since learned republicans have been suing to put a stop to and federal judges have frozen which... thanks guys)

Anyway, before that happened they must have paid off my loans cause... I mean... I cut everything even remotely identifiable out there, but just look... paid in full, $0.00 balance!

So... thank Biden, thanks Harris... you actually did what you said you would

That's a huge weight off me. I mean, I was in forbearance (or whatever the one is where you tell the loan company you've got $0 in income) for a long time (which I learned probably had kind of screwed me over with the old rules) but... this way I don't have to worry that if I ever get on my feet I'll suddenly be slammed by student loans

This means I get to focus on making things better for myself by doing stuff to work on my house so it holds heat better and so my backdoor has a deck instead of a 5 foot dead drop into the basement stairwell

Really fucking wish these student loan repayments wouldn't keep getting blocked by judges, like sorry, now that mine's been paid off I still want the program even though I got mine... I want everyone else to get theirs too

Just... yeah... some good news, some real good news

[countercounterrevolution]

Remember 2016?

Remember when Trump was elected President of the United States of America? Seems like a lot of people don't. People who should have a cogent strategy for building power that doesn't swap horses or try to eat their own every other week, but that's not the way social media platforms work.

I'm seeing tons of people finding any and every excuse for why the decision to overturn Roe v Wade is actually the fault of the Democrats and why they'll never vote for a Democrat again. Like they've never heard of Kristen Sinema or Joe Manchin before and this is all brand new stuff to them that's just being explained for the first time I swear to fucking christ.

If you're prepared for militant action against abortion bans, then say that. Don't blame the fucking democrats for the actions of the republicans. That's what reactionaries do. It's what makes them reactionaries.

Anyway it seems that the goldfish-like attention span of the twitter left streamer organic punditry class has made it to where the trauma of losing to Trump and having McConnell block Scalia's replacement is being experienced fresh anew because they're too left of left to care about the actual current status quo in the struggle for civil rights under capitalism here in the USA. They don't remember because they don't identify as liberals. They mock liberals with the same fervency and intensity as the right wing and now that the delayed response of policy and elections is being laid bare quite clearly, the collective response from popular online leftists on twitter has been a retreat into their online enclaves of echo chamber purity politics.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on people who are basically just sharing their first initial thoughts on current events before thinking out what it really means as a middle finger to respectability politics, but for real these people are all at least in their 30s and have huge followings and positions of authority so I don't feel the least bit bad for expecting more out of them than lashing out at their true enemies (liberals!!!) instead of trying to make the first lick of sense.

They didn't become famous left online personalities by telling people the boring slow route to victory is the most likely. They became famous for pushing an alternative to capitalism during a time when capitalism has been failing for a large number of Americans. They became famous through the failures of democrats to deliver on their promises to the working people of America.

It feels like they're mad at 2008-2010 era Obama for not implementing socialism when he had the chance and instead going the fabian socialist sellout route. I've got plenty of problems with the legacy of the Obama administration, but I'm not daft enough to lay all the problems and horrific fallout that was the Trump administration at the feet of liberals. When you do that, you're not giving reactionaries agency. People make choices. It wasn't a majority, but a large enough slice of Americans voted for Trump that we can't just act like "oh that's Hiliary and Obama's doing 100%."

I mean don't get me wrong, you should feel free to do that 110% if you want, but I think you're a buffoon. Purity politics assholes like that should swap sides because all you're good for is eating your own. So go stand with the Republicans. You'll help the left far more by doing so in the long run.

[fapangel]

Isn't Kushner and Bannon fighting or is this some WWE button pushing acting/hyped up by the media thing? I don't know all the details. BTW, since you seem to have a lot of support for trump has there been anything you wish he can improve on or anything that he did that you didn't quite approve of but either don't care/par for the course?

I honestly haven’t paid muchattention to the Kushner/Bannon thing; this kind of internal cabinetpower-play personality clash is the kind of super in-depthpsychoanalysis bullshit I’ve never been good at - and, I havealways found prone to being twisted by the biases of those doing theanalysis, and that was before the current mediapersonalities that do it went totally apeshit. 

However, this: 

>has there been anything you wish he can improve on or anythingthat he did that you didn't quite approve of but either don'tcare/par for the course?

YEAH I GOT SOME SHIT TO SAY ABOUT THIS. 

For starters, I feel a deep, deep, deep ambivalencetowards the Trump administration’s “war on global warming.”I can see their reasons for it, but Ireally, really don’t think their approach is going to accomplishanything. Furthermore, I’m deeply suspicious of the motives behindit - it might be entirely due to The Decent Reason,but I doubt it, because there’s a very powerful, widespreadsentiment of “global warming denial” in the right wing thatis nothing but knee-jerk reactionary bullshit; where they reject theentire idea just because THE OTHER SIDE is pushing it. This is theexact kind of shit conservatives detest and loathe when used by theleft wing, and yet they happily employ it themselves. At bestthey’re indulging in the same kind of hypocritical blind tribalismthat defines the left, and at worst they’re actively lettingthe opposition frame the debate in stark terms of opposition; a falsedichotomy that only serves their goals. In short, conservativesreally need to unfuck themselves on this issue.

Trufax: Once Upon A Time, I was aglobal warming skeptic - and contrarianism was a significantmotivator for me. I had learned by that time never to give an inch onanything ~THE LEFT~ supported; to challenge every precept they putforth, because so often even the very foundations of their arguments- and thus the frame defining the entire scope of the debate - wereartificial and false. Under this paradigm of “challengeeverything,” my objections were three-fold:

A. I doubted that Global Warming washappening.

B. IF it was happening, I doubted thatit was anthropogenic (caused by human activity.)

C. If it was both happening andanthropogenic, I doubted that any left-wing policies would dojack shit to address the dire consequences they predicted.

Atthe time - ten years ago, or so - there were Science Reasons to fuelthis doubt.The data was questionable, the models, imperfect, and the question ofpoliticized bias up in the air. There were two main camps ofscientists who openly questioned global warming. The first weregeologists and geophysicists who contested the validity of citingvarious physical phenomena as proof of anthropogenic global warming,(such as melting ice sheet, etc.) when it happened to involve theirgeographic area of study. The second were physicists/geophysicistswho questioned the math behind it, especially the energy balanceequations - most famous of them,IvarGiaever,winnerof a Nobel prize for physics, who famously said“Iam a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.”Saidquote comes out of the U.S. Senate Environment And Public WorksCommittee's minority report, which had over 650 actual honest-to-godscientists on record expressing actual, serious doubts vis a visglobal warming. Thenthere was some theories being kicked around that held global warmingto be happening, but not from anthropogenic sources - the mostconvincing (to me) at the time was the possibility of stellar cycles.A lot of levelheaded scientists wondered if we were coming out of aMaunderMinimum,a 60-70 odd year “super-cycle” in solar activity that might beconnected to the “LittleIce Age.”This struck me as the most likely alternate explanation simplybecause of the limited amount of historical data available; it wasquite likely our current observations on global warming just didn'thave a big enough sample size,so we were over-emphasizing the significance of the data bump. Inshort, I had plenty of reason to scoff at the idea of “scientificconsensus” the left constantly invoked.

Thenthe scientists went and didmore scienceto answerthese objections. You know, like they're supposed to. They diddue diligence, they replicated results, they refined models, and inthe end presented a convincing argument - global warming ishappening,and it iscausedby human activity.

However,that still leaves point C: namely, left-wing policies aren't going todo shit to stop it. Justconsider this graph:

Guesswhich nations didn't even have emissions targets set for them?Developing ones, including China, India, Brazil, South Africa, etc.Yes, China. Slowclap. Andyet, the Kyoto protocol - which set an average target of about 5% CO2emissions for most Western nations - was talked up as the greatmoral crusade of our time, asif a measly 5% reduction was going to do jack shit with China pumpingout enough pollution to create a semi-permanent browncloud visible from fucking space.

Thenecessity of these pissweak efforts are justified with the mostoverblown Chicken-Little sky-is-falling bullshit you can conceive of.From Al Gore's theatrically released power-point presentation thatwept for “drowning polar bears” and predicted global catastrophein ten years (complete with a doomsday clock) to media reports ofManhattandrowning by 2015, the constant flow of emotional fearmongeringbullshithasbeen constant, hysterical, and loud.They'vebeen promising us that the end is nigh for twenty-fivefucking years andyet the apocalypse keeps taking a rain-check. The ObamaAdministration's EPA published atypical example:

If climate change goes unaddressed, the report predicts morethan 2,000 storm-mangled bridges, 57,000 deaths from poor air qualityand 12,000 fatalities from extreme temperature between now and theyear 2100... the report argues that the U.S. will save 7.9 millionacres from wildfire, and prevent more than $10 billion in damage toMidwestern farming counties and coastal communities alike.

The reportitself (which you can download in its entirety) has some realgiggles, such as solemnly including damage to coastal properties -you know, those houses that rich morons build on literalfucking sandbars - I'm sorry, I meant “barrier islands” - andact surprised when thishappens. Oh, and the US taxpayer picks up the tab, too. And of course the seas willswallow the land, the rivers will flood, a plague of kekking frogswill go around slaying first-born trust fund inheritors, etc. But thereally notable thing is the more prosaic things in the report; thesimpler predictions of general economic impacts caused by highertemperatures and the resulting long-term weather patterns andecosystem shifts. These are the things that'd actually change life aswe know it in the long term... but MSNBC's story went straight todemolished bridges and body counts. If it bleeds, it leads.

It'snot just the media filter pushing the hype, though it helps - it's adeliberate debate strategy. In formal policy debate, the“affirmative” team argues for a plan of action, and vindicates itby establishing 1. there's a problem, and that 2. Bad Things happenif the problem's not addressed by their plan. The “negative” teamargues that the plan is bad, because implementing the plan will alsolead to Bad Things.Ergo, victory often goes to whomever's predicted Bad Things are theworst. Thisis known as “impacts outweigh,” i.e. my impacts are worse,therefore avoiding them is more important- hundreds dead in aheat wave is preferable to thousands dead in a war, for instance. Theinevitable heaver-impacts arms-race naturally means that almost every“disadvantage” (negative consequence) in policy debate is GlobalThermonuclear War. Everysingle one.

Thisis precisely why greenies wholeheartedly parrot these lurid doomsdayscenarios with the fervor of religious nuts promising that Armageddonis nigh: the impacts outweigh. The warming mitigation policies theychampion come at real and serious costs to the economy, standards ofliving and ultimately people's lives - so theirimpactsmust outweigh that to hold any water. Thetheocratic tones don't end there, as Megan McArdle of Bloombergpoints out in her excellentarticle on how alarmism poisons the global-warming debate:

The arguments about global warming too often sound more liketheology than science. Oh, the word “science” getsthrown around a great deal, but it's cited as a sacred authority, nota fallible process that staggers only awkwardly and unevenly towardthe truth, with frequent lurches in the wrong direction. Icannot count the number of times someone has told me that theybelieve in “the science,” as if that were the name of someomniscient god who had delivered us final answers written in stone.For those people, there can be only two categories in the debate:believers and unbelievers. Apostles and heretics.

In short, the politics of global warming have fuck-all to dowith the actual science most of the time. Scientistsaren't infallible, andthere is some complicity but for the most part thisisn't even the scientists fault. They'renowhere near“controllingthe narrative.” Becausethe politicians and the greenies are speaking for them, theconservative knee-jerk reaction is to throw the baby out with thebathwater and ignore allthescience and everypossibleconclusion as politically tainted; the result of collusion,conspiracy and cherry-picking to serve an agenda. This is theattitude Trump's administration is taking towards it, and whilethey're not wrong to assume that the existing science data on allthose government websites - and the still-serving employees that madethem - definitely have an agenda, justblanking the pages is the wrong approach. Globalwarming isactually happening, andit is actuallycausing problems, andwe will haveto find solutions for it - and since any conservative will agree thatthe left wing's solutions will cripple the economy and do fuck-all toactually stop warming, those solutions had damn well better be ours.

Theglobal warming debate is not about empirical proofs and causes, butabout consequences and mitigation policies. Asthis briefsearch on Slashdot shows, people are finallystarting to really talkabout geoengineering - active mitigation approaches - on a regularbasis, and many are starting to re-think the benefits of nuclearpower, which conservatives have historically championed as reliable,CO2-free baseline load generation. Climate science data will be vitalin pushing these initiatives, both in the horrifically complex andhigh-stakes considerations we must work through thoroughly beforeattempting geoengineering, and in making the economic case fornuclear power. Theadministration's current approach to “The Science” treats it asinnately hostile; already a permanent possession of the Enemy Camp,when it's anything but.More than playing intothe left wing's hands, it's actively ceding them ground without afight, which is ludicrous. Even if the intent is to “nuke andpave,” blanking all the climate data pending a full review andre-write by a new, more conservative bureaucratic science staff, it'sstill a poor way to do it. The resistance seen from the EPA and othergovernment climate-science related agencies has notbeen the blatantinsubordination and borderline treasonous defiance of lawfulauthority displayed by Swamp Thing bureaucrats in other agencies.It's stuff like tweeting about unclassified, non-security relatedclimate science data and appealing to public opinion - rather tamestuff.

Trumpisn't a very conservative conservative on most any of theconservative “social issues,” which means he's either entirelysidestepped or paid mere lip service to a lotof the Usual Suspectswhen it comes to the usual tribal-savage litmus tests (abortion,etc.) Unfortunately climate change isn't one of them, as far as hisadministration goes. The left wing's been allowed to defile climatescience by using it as a shield for their politics. The naturalreaction is to punt that political football back, but that's stillletting the left wing define the terms of the debate. It's badstrategy, ineffective politics and it all leads to ineffectualpolicy.