The Biden Administration (No Lago)

[Omegonthesane]

While the modern world has many more ways to either work for a living or own for a living, and you can combine them in various ways - not all of which are new, small business owners who have to also work at their small business are as old as business - but no matter how you slice it, the bourgeois, those who own for a living versus the proletariat, those who work for a living is the important distinction. The various complications that real life throws up bnow and threw up in Marx's time do not serve to meaningfully undermine that - petty bourgeois and labour aristocrats are not significant enough blocs to overtake the primary contradiction of owners versus workers.

[deaddmwalking]

but no matter how you slice it, the bourgeois, those who own for a living versus the proletariat, those who work for a living is the important distinction.

This is why I asked how we're defining proletariat today. But just so I can confirm my understanding, Taylor Swift is a prole because she primarily draws her wealth from the work that she does?

[Kaelik]

Wow, it's weird that deaddm has access to secret Taylor Swift financial data that no one else has that allows him to make broad statements no one else knows the answer to in his bad faith attempt to ignore the point being made.

Please tell us deaddm. How much did 13 Management pay Taylor Swift as a salary for her labor income last year versus how much did her sole ownership collect in increased value?

[Thaluikhain]

Doesn't she (now) own her own music, so she's not alienated from the fruits of her labour?

(Also...what's Taylor Swift got to do with the Biden administration again? I mean, excepting she's a psyop weapon to encourage people to register to vote or whatever.)

[Kaelik]

Doesn't she (now) own her own music, so she's not alienated from the fruits of her labour?

(Also...what's Taylor Swift got to do with the Biden administration again? I mean, excepting she's a psyop weapon to encourage people to register to vote or whatever.)

Well yes and no. Technically, Taylor swift doesn't own any of her music. It's owned by a management company that she has sole ownership of, and also it might be owned by one or more subsidiaries to that main company.

But since it's an actual company, it has a bunch of employees and expenses, so when some song of her is streamed the money is paid through some process into a company that then has to pay some percentage of any proceeds in some amount to various employees and for various expenses before Taylor could collect a salary or, theoretically, sell ownership. The company might also invest that money in who knows how many ways which might produce a bunch of ownership based proceeds.

Which is to say, we could ignore the corporate form and recognize that Taylor Swift makes some money from some subset of owernship and labor in a mix we can't possibly know, or we can pay attention to the corporate form and say that Taylor Swift makes some money or possibly expenses literally everything to a corporation and we have no idea because she keeps it a secret.

Either way, no one actually knows how much of her wealth comes from ownership vs labor, because even if dividing it were clearly possible in a specific way she keeps the financials hidden enough that we don't have that information.

But yes, if only anyone had thought to respond to deaddm's bad faith point in advance such as by saying "petty bourgeois and labour aristocrats are not significant enough blocs to overtake the primary contradiction of owners versus workers."

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I thought admitting this was a both an off topic tangent he wouldn't otherwise engage in AND a bad faith argument but blaming it on other people was a bad faith way of disarming it and backing down quietly while saving face.

Apparently not. Apparently despite those admissions it continues. Yep.

Look the fuzzy line between capital and labor isn't that complex, I have explained this to one of my employees while working up to my elbows in pond mud.

There are two things. You can be two things. You can be two things in varying proportions. You can be more than two things. When more than two things exist, and they do, some things look a lot like other things in some way, but are not the same things. The various principles of 2+ things apply to Marxism, and yes, I'm pretty sure Marx knew that and accounted for it so no you have not found an exciting new attack angle. Are there any other fundamentally basic concepts of language and existence that need covering here?

[Omegonthesane]

Remember back in 2019 when Biden tweeted that we don't need another war in the Middle East, in the context of complaining that then-President Bad Orange Man was behaving in a manner which might make this slightly more likely?

No? Me neither. ok who am I kidding someone reposted a tweet that I probably didn't see the first time

[Kaelik]

Remember back in 2019 when Biden tweeted that we don't need another war in the Middle East, in the context of complaining that then-President Bad Orange Man was behaving in a manner which might make this slightly more likely?

No? Me neither. ok who am I kidding someone reposted a tweet that I probably didn't see the first time

I recently saw someone tweeting the Biden 2020 platform the part where he opposes BDS because it "let's the Palestinians off the hook for their choices" which is an extremely interesting choice of words! Turns out the Palestinians need to be punished with Aparthied (and presumably also genocide) because of their choice to be born brown or something.

[deaddmwalking]

Wow, it's weird that deaddm has access to secret Taylor Swift financial data that no one else has that allows him to make broad statements no one else knows the answer to in his bad faith attempt to ignore the point being made.

Please tell us deaddm. How much did 13 Management pay Taylor Swift as a salary for her labor income last year versus how much did her sole ownership collect in increased value?

Look, I thought you could identify who was a prole and who was the proletariat easily. But it's not like I brought up Taylor Swift for no reason at all.

And it’s ushered the 33-year-old pop queen into yet another new era: she is now a billionaire and the first musician to make the ranks solely based on her songs and performances. According to Forbes estimates, she is worth more than $1.1 billion, up $360 million from June when Swift ranked no. 34 among America’s richest self made women.

Source: Forbes Note the article may be subject to a monthly limit without subscribing.

There are two things. You can be two things. You can be two things in varying proportions. You can be more than two things. When more than two things exist, and they do, some things look a lot like other things in some way, but are not the same things. The various principles of 2+ things apply to Marxism, and yes, I'm pretty sure Marx knew that and accounted for it so no you have not found an exciting new attack angle. Are there any other fundamentally basic concepts of language and existence that need covering here?

Look, I didn't bring the distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeois into this conversation. That was PseudoStupidity and when I explained I wasn't sure how it was being used TODAY he gave me the following explanation:

Bourgeoise refers to the members of the bourgeois class. The bourgeois are the class of capital ownership, they are the ones who own the means of production (ex: Jeff Bezos, the guy who owns your local car dealership, every single landlord, etc.). It can be broken down further (the petit-bourgeoise are exactly what that sounds like) but we're talking about people who make their money by owning things instead of selling their labor (labor-sellers are the proletariat, or working class). We are not talking about the ill-defined middle class of developed nations that are frequently a mix of bourgeoise and proletariat.

When Marx talks about the distinction between the classes, there doesn't seem to be any doubt or ambiguity. When I ask 'Is Taylor Swift a member of the proletariat' and the answer I'm getting is 'she is if she makes all her money from her own labor', I'm frankly in disbelief. I thought it would be quite obvious that she is not a member of the proletariat in the way Marx thought about it. Apparently that's wrong. Apparently the only way to know if someone is a member of the bourgeois class is to obtain a copy of their tax return and then carefully evaluate how much income from 'ownership' versus how much income from 'labor' and somehow calculate a proportion that ensures teachers are members of the proletariat if their retirement savings is 'incidental' compared to their wage earnings, but nobody has proposed a litmus test for what amount of earnings qualifies. The best we have is a vague 'relative amounts are significant'.

I'm all for pointing at Warren Buffett and saying 'the man is worth more than a billion dollars, so the Marxist definition of the proletariat includes whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labour power for a wage or salary (taken from the Wikipedia article on the proletariat) doesn't appear to apply - and that seems to be the case regardless of whether he lives on his income from running a company or from owning the means of production. Ultimately that distinction is meaningless because he has the resources to purchase the means of production if and when he wants. Similarly, Taylor Swift who in prior centuries would have been included in the 'Lumpenproletariat', but with 'organized labor in the entertainment industry' and industrial music production and distribution as capital B Big Business, I wouldn't think those terms would apply.

Kaelik is being coy. People have pointed fingers at Jeff Bezos as 'the bourgeois'. The only definition I've seen (sorry if I've missed another) is that if the primary means of earning a living is the fruit of your labor as opposed to the ownership of the means of production, you are a member of the proletariat. Now, if the 'product' is a dance or song, than owning your labor IS owning the means of production, but similarly if the 'product' is digging a trench and you get hired out as a day laborer from a Home Depot Parking lot, you own the means of production (your physical labor). A definition that fails to distinguish the most successful entertainer of our age and a day laborer seems....grossly inadequate. I'm sure these terms aren't confusing when talking about an individual who owns a factory and an individual who works in a factory, but less than 10% of American workers are in a factory.

And I suppose that all the football players, movie stars, popular singers, entertainers, comedians, TV personalities (etc) aren't a real big percentage of the population, but they seem to have a real big concentration of wealth and power, so I don't see how Marxist ideology (especially as maintained by people living in 2024) fails to account for them. I'm a college educated guy who has learned a lot about how Marxist thought has impacted modern society, but I don't really understand how people try to use those terms today. And if it's simple and easy and there's no reason for me to be confused can someone give me a definition that explains how someone who receives dividends from stocks in their 401(k) is or isn't bourgeois???

[Kaelik]

Owning intellectual property isn't actually the same thing as being paid for your labor. Labor is the thing you do. Ip is when the government shoots people if they don't pay you every time they do labor.

Football players are clear workers until they start a health and fitness business, various peoples royalties might be considered income for their labor in writing something, but Taylor swift getting paid every time someone wants to play blankspace in a movie isn't her being paid for her labor any more then rem records getting paid anytime someone wants to play fallout boy in a movie is rem records being paid for their labor.

There are people with mixed income sources and Taylor is one of them, but the amount of the mix tells us already that she fits in your allegedly totally understandable Warren buffet definition of the bourgouise as soon as you stop pretending to not understand the concept of ip rights.

The guy who digs a trench for a salary is a worker. But he doesn't get to benefit from the increased land value and charge everyone who uses the trench. If the guy who digs the trench is a landlord who improves his property value or charges the city for run-through then he falls into the petty bourgousie category already talked about, and we can still recognize that the value he gets from the trench is partly from his labor but also from his ownership of the property.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Every single time I answer for DeadDM on these issues for him, I accurately predictively save him time and massive word count. Remember I said this?

He is a "centrist" liberal. He believes that if a word was ever used by Marx then its probably a Communist Russiagate hoax and not really a word and should never be acknowledged to mean anything on its own terms.

And what is he doing? Trying to discredit Marxism by pretending a single simple piece of terminology is meaningless, because 2+ things exist principles are too complex for him to grasp.

And, as a liberal brain rot scumbag, he isn't even really trying to convince anyone that Marx was wrong, he doesn't care that he isn't able to make it too complex for anyone other than himself to understand.

It's performative. He just needs to distance himself as far away as possible from the Marx cooties all over that word.

[PseudoStupidity]

We need to tell all the Marxist intellectuals to stop doing whatever the fuck it is they do asap, DDM has proven Marxism is wrong because he doesn't understand bourgeois and proletariat. And also he has no idea how popular musicians make money apparently?

To try and bring it back on track, Dead all the people who are in Congress and who become President are RICH PEOPLE (we'll not use big words like bourgeois) and they get picked by other RICH PEOPLE to run for office. POOR PEOPLE virtually never have candidates who represent their interests because RICH PEOPLE have all the money and power to ensure RICH PEOPLE are the candidates for every election that matters. This means POOR PEOPLE are totally unrepresented even though they do get to vote (even though the votes frequently don't matter at all due to how US elections are run), because their choices are between RICH PERSON A and RICH PERSON B and those two RICH PEOPLE, by virtue of being RICH, have very similar interests. A POOR PERSON who wants to represent POOR PEOPLE would never get to be President, because they would lack the funding since RICH PEOPLE would never give their money and power to someone who doesn't represent their interests.

Obviously the above looks like it was made for a child, but I hope it makes more sense to you. We're not in a democracy because only RICH PEOPLE get an actual say in who runs the country. The problem with what I said in this post is that things are more complicated than just being rich vs poor, but you apparently cannot classes based on the relationship people have to the means of production. Maybe that explains why your politics are so bad?

[deaddmwalking]

If someone is 'two things' and those two things are 'proletariat' and 'bourgeois' that would make the term 'incoherent' which is what I said originally. And if we can't agree on a definition I don't know if I can answer the question.

Barrack Obama didn't seem to be 'bourgeois' when we was elected as a State Senator, but if having a 401k makes him bourgeois, maybe I'm wrong. His net worth appears to have been $800k when he was elected to the White House. Obviously as one of 100 Senators, he had national prestige, but I don't think he 'owned the means of production'. But if I can't get anyone to explain how you can quickly point to someone and determine whether they're a class enemy or not, how I can answer whether there are counter-examples or not? We're in a 'No True Scotsman' situation - anyone I point out who wasn't rich and powerful when they were elected to the Senate becomes rich and powerful when they are elected to the Senate, so maybe it's true that 'no elected Senator' is part of the proletariat, but that appears to be because you are automatically elevated from the proletariat when you're elected. Almost as if it isn't about how you earn your money and more about your status.

[Kaelik]

If someone is 'two things' and those two things are 'proletariat' and 'bourgeois' that would make the term 'incoherent' which is what I said originally. And if we can't agree on a definition I don't know if I can answer the question.

Barrack Obama didn't seem to be 'bourgeois' when we was elected as a State Senator, but if having a 401k makes him bourgeois, maybe I'm wrong. His net worth appears to have been $800k when he was elected to the White House. Obviously as one of 100 Senators, he had national prestige, but I don't think he 'owned the means of production'. But if I can't get anyone to explain how you can quickly point to someone and determine whether they're a class enemy or not, how I can answer whether there are counter-examples or not? We're in a 'No True Scotsman' situation - anyone I point out who wasn't rich and powerful when they were elected to the Senate becomes rich and powerful when they are elected to the Senate, so maybe it's true that 'no elected Senator' is part of the proletariat, but that appears to be because you are automatically elevated from the proletariat when you're elected. Almost as if it isn't about how you earn your money and more about your status.

1) It does not appear to be true that Obama had 800k when entering office, though it's hard to say exactly because he was in fact married at the time. For example, he made 8.8 million dollars from Audacity of Hope and of thee I sing: a letter to my daughters after it became a bestseller in 2006. Dreams From My Father pulled in 6.8 million from 2005 to 2016. It's somewhat difficult to specifcy exactly how much was before or after being president, but I'm seeing a lot of estimates of a few million before office and the implication that the 800k number was some right wing number designed to show Obama's in presidency wealth increase to be as large as possible.

But from 2005 to 2016 Obama made 3.1 million from his presidential salary and 610k from his senatorial salary, which are the only credibly labor income during that time from him. There was also 130k from corporate boards, 760k from the U of Chicago hospital, 250k miscellaneous. And it's not clear how much of that was Michelle, but also, you quickly run into the obvious problem that most of that money are just bribes, and the money that isn't bribes is like trench ownership, you wouldn't get paid it without being president, which is distinctly ownership like. So it sure looks like while president and probably while in the senate he made significantly more money from ownership then he did from labor.

2) As already discussed, Obama spent 1.136 billion to get reelected in 2012 from just him and the democratic party, even before counting private pacs. in 2008 it was 774 million from his committe, not sure the dem party, and 89 million from pacs.

So to be president requires being given a billion dollars, regardless of if you think the person involved is a laborer or not. If you are an extremely rich 5 million dollar labor aristocrat and you run for president, the first step to winning is to convince a bunch of billionaires who own things to give you a billion dollars collectively across them. Such as by not declaring yourself a socialist or outlining a policy of gutting raytheon and prohibiting arm sales.

Bernie Sanders raised about 225 million each time from small donors, and guess what, they are done, no one is donating small dollars to a socialist campaign ever again because it turns out that option is foreclosed and people don't have the money to do it again.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

If someone is 'two things' and those two things are 'tennis player' and 'golfer' that would make the term 'incoherent'

Fixed that for you for clarity.

Roles and class memberships aren't RPS elemental magic systems. They don't "cancel out". You can be 2+ things.

Honestly you know I'm on a crusade against RPS game mechanics, THIS, THIS is how much damage they do to a persons brain. Reverting back to toddler levels where they throw a tantrum because the fireman cannot possibly also be a gardener.

[deaddmwalking]

If someone is 'two things' and those two things are 'tennis player' and 'golfer' that would make the term 'incoherent'

Fixed that for you for clarity.

Roles and class memberships aren't RPS elemental magic systems. They don't "cancel out". You can be 2+ things.

Honestly you know I'm on a crusade against RPS game mechanics, THIS, THIS is how much damage they do to a persons brain. Reverting back to toddler levels where they throw a tantrum because the fireman cannot possibly also be a gardener.

You didn't fix jack shit. For what it's worth, I think you're the only one who is trying to claim that someone can be BOTH a member of the proletariat and a member of the bourgeois. And there's a reason why. Because those are mutually exclusive categories that stand in opposition to each other. You can't be 'working class' and 'ownership class', just like you can't have a glucose level of 70 and 140. You either are diabetic or you're not. Not fucking 'both'.

[Kaelik]

I mean on an extremely basic level the chronological progress of time means you can be both things.

More relevantly you can collect income from multiple sources and still be clearly in the ownership class. You can under some definitions also be a worker at the same time. But this is already classified under petite bourgouise if you work for your own ownership in certain kinds of small businesses and "literally fake accounting shit" when some guy is a ceo of a company or takes a salary from their sole ownership or gets paid 130k to sit on a corporate board they own stock in.

No one not pretending to be stupid on purpose is confused by the concept that Warren buffet has a salary.

[deaddmwalking]

No one not pretending to be stupid on purpose is confused by the concept that Warren buffet has a salary.

I pointed out that teachers primarily earn their income from their salary, but they also have stock ownership through their 401(k) and/or retirement savings plan. Similarly, Warren Buffett earns a salary, but also owns shares in one of the largest holding companies in the world that owns huge companies outright and also owns chunks of other companies.

Clearly there is a difference between the average school teacher earning $66k annually and Warren Buffet with is $128 Billion net worth. But apparently we can't use a definition of proletariat that makes sure that a teacher qualifies and that Warren Buffett doesn't?

If you win the lottery but don't do anything with your money but spend it, you're not 'proletariat'. It doesn't matter where your money comes from nearly as much as how much money you have.

And as far as Obama, you didn't offer any pre-Senate estimates for net-worth, nor did you indicate that you think he earned his money through ownership (instead earning through paid work in a law firm), seemingly indicating that he was, prior to election, a member of the Proletariat. I maintain that you can't STILL be a prole after winning federal office, but I never made the claim that you couldn't win federal office without being part of the 'ownership class'. Further, I maintain that you can earn 100% of your wages from your labor and not be a member of the proletariat (like a lawyer, doctor, etc).

So seriously, if this is such a simple concept, can someone answer Y/N regarding Taylor Swift and pre-election Obama? And clearly I concede that someone could be working class and become bourgeois (or move the other way) so saying '4th dimensionally, one person could have been born working class but died bourgeois' is not a gotcha. Kaelik, do you think that someone can be both at the same time? How do you square that with Marxist thought?

[Kaelik]

Clearly there is a difference between the average school teacher earning $66k annually and Warren Buffet with is $128 Billion net worth. But apparently we can't use a definition of proletariat that makes sure that a teacher qualifies and that Warren Buffett doesn't?

The already existing definition that you don't like already distinguishes between those two people. Everyone but you doesn't look at 14 dollars of yearly income from a 401k and wonder if it might be a useful method of bad faith arguing to pretend that person is Warren Buffet.

If you win the lottery but don't do anything with your money but spend it, you're not 'proletariat'. It doesn't matter where your money comes from nearly as much as how much money you have.

Yeah, because gambling isn't labor income. Jesus, at least try to use examples that are actually people who do make their money from labor when you pretend to not understand the concept that's been explained to you 50 times. Say football player again.

And as far as Obama, you didn't offer any pre-Senate estimates for net-worth, nor did you indicate that you think he earned his money through ownership (instead earning through paid work in a law firm), seemingly indicating that he was, prior to election, a member of the Proletariat.

You didn't offer any pre Senate estimates of his net worth either. I was correcting your stupid claim, and in the process showing that while he was a senator and while he was the president his income was predominately from ownership. The specifics of what it was when he was a State Senator wasn't relevant, but yeah, he probably got more money from ownership then salary during his career as a state senator and part time Lecturer, and definitely didn't make the money through paid work in a lawfirm, because he didn't work in a law firm ever*. He, like almost all law professors, went from law school directly to "teaching" by which I mean two years as a fellow while he wrote his first book and then teaching briefly, and then teaching on the side while running for office.

*As a lawyer, he worked as an intern in the summers.

So seriously, if this is such a simple concept, can someone answer Y/N regarding Taylor Swift and pre-election Obama?

Pre what election, you've already been answered as to both of those things, and then you just decided to pretend you didn't understand the answer and make up a new example to ask for.

so saying '4th dimensionally, one person could have been born working class but died bourgeois' is not a gotcha. Kaelik, do you think that someone can be both at the same time? How do you square that with Marxist thought?

What if instead of asking this question, you read the post where I answered this. It's the one I know you read part of because it's also the one where you felt the need to inform me that a joke I made was not a gotcha.

[deaddmwalking]

Look, if a) you think you answered a question and I don't think you answered it and b) you think I'm an idiot, saying 'I already answered that' makes you look extra foolish.

Are you now saying that a football player isn't earning money from their labor exactly the same way that a teacher is earning money for their labor? NFL Labor relations being what they are, I think they have a lot in common. You don't?

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

But this is already classified under petite bourgouise

It's almost like someone anticipated childish attempts at exactly this sort of juvenile argument, already identified one of the largest and most important edge cases of being both categories at once, and discussed its functions and interactions in detail.

It's almost like petite bourgeoisie so fucking famous and well developed as a concept that you might have heard of it BEFORE you heard of your regular bourgeoisie. I know myself I was like that, AS A CHILD.

And being 2+ things and its interaction with Marxist terms was anticipated and answered, not just before this thread, not just before modern neoliberal attempts to pretend everything old is new and unprecedented again, not just before DeadDM was born, but like, you know, AGES ago. Like, Marx was probably still dancing Disco and had a 70s Perm or something.

[Kaelik]

Look, if a) you think you answered a question and I don't think you answered it and b) you think I'm an idiot, saying 'I already answered that' makes you look extra foolish.

Are you now saying that a football player isn't earning money from their labor exactly the same way that a teacher is earning money for their labor? NFL Labor relations being what they are, I think they have a lot in common. You don't?

Stop trying to convince me you really are that stupid and not just pretending to be in bad faith.

When I said that you should use rich people who actually made their money from labor like footballers, was I saying that, in direct contradiction to the thing I said, that footballers don't make money from labor? No. Hope this helps.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Stop trying to convince me you really are that stupid and not just pretending to be in bad faith.

He already openly admitted the entire tangent is bad faith.

So I guess, gotcha? He already stopped ages ago... before then just picking up and continuing like it was nothing.

I guess its a new thing "Yeah I'm arguing in bad faith, the only thing that means is that I'm even more immune to criticism! Here's another 5000 word salads saying the same thing over and over"

[Kaelik]

Joe Biden 2 months ago: I will offer republicans arming Israeli genocide in return for funding Ukraine.

Joe Biden 1 month ago: I will offer the gop arming Israeli genocide AND psycho border murderathon for arming Ukraine.

Joe Biden today: I will offer the gop amring psycho border murderation for my goal of arming Israel, fuck Ukraine, turns out I don't give a shit about those guys.

It will also be rejected, because the GOP's goal is whine about the border until the election, but goddam if Joe Biden isn't trying has hard as possible to pass a law deporting ally asylum seekers without a hearing.

Edit: Briefly, worth saying, this is and always has been a losing strategy. Every time the Dems have given the GOP everything they wanted they have always simply moved the goal posts and asked for more, and their voters didn't give dems any credit because there was never a real problem to begin with, it was always a fake problem created by their propaganda, so unless the GOP propaganda gives Biden credit, all the cruelty will sway zero votes.

This didn't work when Clinton gutted welfare, this didn't work when dems spent decades comprimising on abortion, and this didn't work when Obama became the cruelest border president (at the time.) It's not working now when Biden is the cruelest border president (at this time) either, because the problem has never been too much welfare, too much abortion, or too much immigration. It has always been the case that our systems were already too cruel, and amping up the cruelty only amped up the cruelty, making the world a worse place, and premeptively conceding the debate. Now it will be decades before we can ever even imagine a democratic party that doesn't want to close the border because all the senators and the president spend every day agreeing the border needs to be closed and talking about how concerning immigration is.

This is what voting for centrist gets you, a worse world for nothing.

[PseudoStupidity]

The only good news about the current Israel/Border/Ukraine bill is that it won't go anywhere. If the Republican opposition crumbles and they give themselves what they want (crueler border, more genocide, more money to defense contractors) they are more likely to lose the election, and if the Republican opposition doesn't crumble we don't get to do all the horrible things that are in the bill. In my experience Republicans care way more about winning elections than doing the evil shit they're paid to do, so throw out those low holds because this bill is DoA (except it's Dead on Arrival, not Dead or Alive). It's worth mentioning the only unambiguously good thing in the bill was some humanitarian aid to Gaza afaik. That humanitarian aid is desperately needed, but seeing as it'd be coming with $14 billion for Israel I think the Palestinians would prefer we don't pass this one. Maybe we can just send the desperately needed humanitarian aid, for dealing with a genocide we are openly supporting, anyways?

I agree we are probably fucked on the border for a while, but I do think there's a bit of positive news that we have some Democrats going against this. Senator Menendez even went so far as to say "If these changes were being considered under Trump, Democrats would be in outrage, but because we want to win an election Latinos and immigrants now find themselves on the altar of sacrifice." He's correct and I think it's a nice little soundbite. This is not an endorsement of Menendez either, that guy is a corrupt motherfucker who supports genocide, but even he has the good sense to oppose such bad legislation.

I am curious to hear what DDM's thoughts on this bill are and if he wants it to pass or fail. Seems like an obvious "I hope this shitty bill fails" for anyone who's even remotely decent, but if someone thought Biden losing the election would literally end our fake democracy you may end up getting a justification of material support for genocide so we can prevent Trump from being president (where he would do genocide EVEN WORSE). And of course that's before getting into all the other bad stuff in the bill, but maybe we'll also get told the Ukrainians who are being dragged off the streets and thrown into trenches actually love war and just need more weapons to do it.