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nientedal · 6 months

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What progress at home has biden enacted? What policies of his show that he is making progress that prove he is actually different than trump?

I like to pretend I have faith in humanity, so I'll answer as if you're asking this in good faith.

Biden's DEA has lifted restrictions on telehealth prescriptions to make appointments and assistance more accessible.

He put a funding package into place to help unhoused people get access to mental and physical healthcare, as well as short-term and long-term housing.

He has attempted and is still attempting to get student debt relief through - this was blocked by Republican judges appointed by Trump, but he's still working on it.

Infrastructure repair - his administration has budgeted funds to actually fix some severely-damaged and frequently-traveled bridges.

Trying to expand access to healthcare to include undocumented immigrants who came to the USA as children (Dreamers) under the Affordable Care Act. Support for Navigator programs and outreach has also been increased.

He has vetoed Republican-led bills that were attempting to overturn environmental protections - one that would have forbidden investment fund managers to consider climate change in their portfolios (I have two degrees in accounting and this is actually huge), and another that would have overturned restrictions on agricultural runoff into our waterways.

He and his administration worked for ages to get rail workers paid sick days.

This is just some of what he's been doing. Meanwhile, Trump and other Republicans want to criminalize the lives of LGBT people like you and me. They want to eliminate no-fault divorce and force births that will kill parents or devastate them financially. They have stated flat out that they want to install a military dictatorship in the USA. They attempted to put that in motion on January 6th, 2021. They failed once. They will do better next time.

One party wants to house the homeless and expand social safety nets, while the other one wants to criminalize homelessness. One of them wants a future in which I might be able to vote to change how much of a war machine my country is, while the other one wants to eliminate my ability to vote entirely. Those are not the same. Those literally are opposites.

At the end of the day, all you and I can do is choose to do the least amount of harm possible. You and I cannot choose to do no harm. This is the USA, we sell war, you and I cannot choose to do no harm. I wish we could, my god do I wish we could, but that is not an option. So we grieve for the harm we couldn't eliminate and work to minimize the harm that is done. Despite all the crap they support, Democrats are the minimum amount of harm right now. Acting like they aren't is exactly what brought us to an election where our options are a future where we are either wading in blood or drowning in it.

Not voting for Biden will not help Palestine. Not voting for Biden will guarantee a Republican president who will make the situation in Palestine WORSE. AND it'll hurt a lot of other places as well, both at home and abroad, because Republicans are about business and the USA is in the business of war! And I would very much like that to change someday! I would very much like to someday be able to choose to do no harm! And I know what I have to do to try for that future, so what are YOU going to do? There is no standing off to the side in this. If you aren't helping pull, you're the dead weight we're pulling. Are you going to dig your feet into the mud and blood and drown us there? Or are you going to get the fuck off your ass, grit your teeth, and help us pull free?

#askbasket #iam-the-wild #us politics #israel #palestine #if you do not vote blue you do not get to call yourself an antifascist #i HATE that that's the case; don't mistake me #but that is the reality we're working with #there isn't any other #do nothing and kill five people or act and kill one.#so what are you gonna do? i can't choose for you. but i know what my choice is.#i'm part of this world. and as much as i hate it...turning away is not one of the options.#we fight on ALL fronts #we protest we donate we write we call #AND WE ALSO FUCKING VOTE FOR THE LEAST OF THE EVILS. BECAUSE NO EVIL IS NOT AN OPTION.

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treehugginglibrarian · 5 years

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“But what about.”

A tale of liberal elitist assholery, what-about-isms, and people just generally failing to ever be satisfied by the internet or each other. Ever.

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. We don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn.

At least, if they’re being honest, that’s what a lot of liberals would be saying regarding the recent burning of la Cathedrale de Notre Dame in Paris. Instead, they’re going with a refrain that’s old and familiar among more socially liberal subsets of the online community whenever something that they deem “unimportant” or “less than” is damaged, destroyed, or otherwise harmed.

What-About-Isms! (Weird, because we’re so fucking good at calling out conservatives when they “what-about-ism” us… huh… funny how that works…)

“How are people donating money to this problem when there’s a war in Syria and a famine in Yemen?”

“So glad how many tourists a place gets makes it more important than war, famine, or poverty.”

“If the billionaires can fix this problem, why can’t they fix world hunger? The economic inequality in the world?”

“Really? Flint still doesn’t have drinking water and this is what people are spending their money on?”

And so on. And on. And on. But not really, because liberal what-about-isms are exactly as creative as conservative ones, which means they’re really all just a variation of those four. Come on, guys. If we’re gonna dicks, too, we should at least be more creative at it.

While I have a read a couple of elegant albeit clearly privileged rants, most of the complaints, memes, and crappy cartoons are being drawn by normal, though well-educated, liberal folks who think they mean well.

You’re not doing “well.” You sound like a bunch of educated, elitist, assholes telling the rest of America (and the world, since many of y’all are lecturing billionaires in France now) what should or should not be important to them, what is or is not worth spending money on, and what individual people should or should not be sad about. You’re also, effectively, telling people what news they should be consuming and what media they should be watching. Which means, not even inadvertently, you’re telling people how they should spend their spare time and, often, their spare change. I’m a librarian and I don’t even pull that shit, because intellectual freedom is sort of important and coercive learning isn’t a particularly useful educational tool.

Just stop. No seriously. Stop. You’re not helping your cause. You’re not making people more interested in Syria, or Libya, or Lebanon, or Palestine, or Israel, or the Philippines, or the south of Thailand, or Myanmar, or Russia, or Kenya, or South Africa, or Ukraine, or, or, or. See, I can play that game, too. I bet that some of my uber liberal, supposedly well-read friends, can’t tell you what’s going on in some of those countries. What about Guatemala? El Salvador? Ecuador? Mexico, Puerto Rico, Italy, France (aside from their Cathedral), the UK, Northern Ireland specifically, India, Kashmir, Pakistan, or Iraq? Who are the Kurds? Where are the Kurds? What are they up to right now? Are you bored yet? Do you know about the famines in Sudan, Nigeria, and Somalia, or only the one in Yemen? Are you tired of being told how ill-informed you are? Do you feel foolish for not knowing what’s going on in every single one of those countries?

Don’t. Don’t feel foolish. You’re human. No human can, or should, know every bad thing that is going on everywhere in the world. It’s not feasible and it’s emotionally exhausting. Those are just the countries I’ve read about in the news during the course of the last six months or so. Some are at war. Some are experiencing internal strife. Some are committing genocide or something that resembles it. Many are just in the midst of famine or suffering poverty so extreme it makes the homelessness crisis in America look non-existent. I am sure there are hundreds of issues the world over besides just these, and I’m sure many of them are as severe or more than the ones I’ve mentioned above. Which means, in many ways, the what-about-isms surrounding the burning of a Cathedral aren’t just elitist, they’re hypocritical.

“How are people donating to this when there’s a war in Syria and a famine in Yemen?”

Okay, but there’s also wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are basically perpetual incursions in the Kashmir region between Pakistan and India. There are effectively genocides going on in various countries in Africa. Depending on how Brexit breaks, violence may well break out in Northern Ireland, again. Russia is occupying parts of Ukraine, still. Venezuela is in such a great state of upheaval, other countries are considering intervention. At least three nations in Africa are in the midst of a horrible famine. Hell, our own state of California just crawled out of a drought that it had been in for years. A drought that led to wildfires that caused the destruction of thousands of homes, many of which still haven’t been rebuilt and likely won’t be rebuilt for decades. And absolutely none of that will matter if we don’t stop climate change and save the fucking bees. But your focus is Syria and Yemen specifically? What makes them important? Why are they special? And why should they be more important and more special than every other conflict or food-oriented crisis on the planet? I can most definitely what-about-ism your what-about-ism until the cows come home, because there’s almost certainly something horrible going on somewhere else that I can toss in your face as being just as important as your bullshit what-about-ism.

“So glad how many tourists a place gets makes it more important than war or famine.”

Not necessarily more important, just more well known. When we threw 59 missiles at an airbase in Syria, it made the front page of one of the newspapers sitting behind the reference desk where I work. Sure, it was in the local newspaper, but it wasn’t deemed interesting enough for front page news. Notre Dame burned and it was on the front page of every fucking paper on the planet the next day. Hell, it’s on the front page of all four papers sitting behind my reference desk today. Three out of four them it is, for the second day, the obvious front page story. Why? Because people know what and where that Cathedral is. Seeing a story about a recognizable object or place is going to make someone pick up the newspaper and read it. Media centers know that, and they plan their layouts accordingly. People will only know about the items and entities that are placed before them for their intellectual consumption. A place having a lot of tourists doesn’t make it inherently more important, but it does make it inherently more well-known, and thus a better story.

Before anyone says “seek out better news sources,” it’s worth considering the fact that better news sources require both access and time. These are not two commodities that everyone has. Money, or a local library, are necessary to make access to things like the New York Times or the Washington Post possible. Things like NPR, the BBC, and PBS are all free access, but they still require broadband or wireless access, via internet or a data plan. The number of people without ready access to the digital world is literally unknown in this country, because it’s not a question that’s ever been asked on a census and the few times the government has tried to do a conclusive count it’s come up stymied. Assuming that the entire country has ready access to any news they want at the touch of a finger is an intensely privileged assumption to make. Don’t believe me? Work a library reference desk for a day and count how many people call for phone numbers because they lack a means by which to look them up. Then tell me again that ready, and immediate, access to “acceptable” news sources is something they’re probably overly concerned about.

Even for those with ready internet access, financial means, or access to a library, time is still a constraint. We can only consume so much media in a day. We can only fit so much, full stop, in a single day. I know more about what’s up than most people, because I work a job that allows me to read the news while at work. One of my many tasks is literally clipping relevant news articles from the local paper so I am, in effect, paid to stay “in the know.” How are we going to tell a single mother who works insane hours that, after she’s finally gotten her kids to bed, she should be reading up on the crisis in Syria rather than catching up with her friends on Facebook? Her life is not abnormal, which means her lack of insight into the world, existing not because of a lack of caring but because of a lack of time, is not abnormal. How are we going to tell the couple with sick parents and an overdue mortgage that their concern for a Cathedral, the one piece of news they were able to catch up on in between hospice visits and work, speaks to their character?

The fact that so many people are so concerned about a damned church is not cause for alarm, it’s actually cause for a sigh of relief. It means people haven’t completely tuned out. It means people are, in fact, paying attention to what’s going on in other parts of the world. Even people who genuinely lack the time or money to dedicate to “adequate” intellectual pursuits are still, on occasion, tuning in to the rest of the world. Do not discourage that with your snarky elitist “you’re paying attention to the wrong things” bullshit.

“If the billionaires can fix this problem, why can’t they fix world hunger? The economic inequality in the world?”

First, how do you know what the billionaires are spending their money on? Do you disclose everything you spend your money on? Am I allowed to start approving your philanthropic pursuits and telling you what you can/should donate to? Bill and Melinda Gates all but single-handedly (or rather, single-walletedly) eliminated certain diseases via vaccinations. Oprah is educating young girls in multiple countries. Elon Musk is trying to get us to Mars, for fucks sake. Billionaires, like all humans, are capable of super shitty things. They’re also capable of super awesome things. They’re not capable of fixing all of the problems in the world and, honestly, they shouldn’t be expected to. While billionaires in the United States rarely pay their “fair share” of taxes, those in other countries often do. Which means that the billionaires in France who have pledged (read: started a fierce and ridiculous competition, but whatever) to help rebuild the Cathedral have likely already donated to the French coiffeurs and are now doing what they consider to be “their part” (read: are now competing to prove they’re the best rich Frenchman of them all) to help ensure the government doesn’t have to rebuild a national monument. Because that’s what Notre Dame is.

While it may hold Catholic services, it’s not owned by the Catholic church. Which means the church is, in no way, required to repair it. If France wants to guarantee its maintenance for future generations, it’s not something that can be left to the church. A couple of billionaires are making sure the dent it puts in the available tax base is relatively minimal, even if that’s not necessarily their intent. You don’t have to commend them for it, but I’d recommend not lambasting them for it, since the Cathedral is getting fixed one way or another. The more billionaires “waste” their money on it, the less tax payers will feel it.

But “why” is it getting fixed? Why does it matter? Why can’t they spend the money on something else? It was started in the 1100s. It is one of the oldest, largest, standing examples of French Gothic architecture in the world. Some of the most important events in French history have happened in or at that Cathedral. History is important, as liberals who call for reparations are well aware. Those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it, as liberals who scream that we should be punching Nazis cannot have forgotten. There is essentially nothing in our country so important to us, so fundamental to the fabric of our being as a nation, that we would be willing to dedicate millions of dollars to repairing it if it was damaged. Part of this is that we’re a very new nation still. Part of this is that much of our history is tarnished, some horribly so. Much of this is that America, for all its “pride,” lacks an overarching sense of identity.

We are, and have for some time been, quite fractured. By politics, by religion, by skin tone, by the fact that we have always been an imperialist melting pot founded upon a land that we stole from another people. There are few structures or places in this country that hold a significance large enough to all of us that they would be overwhelmingly viewed as worth saving. While France is seeing some internal strife, they are a nation that largely possesses a sense of identity. I can’t really tell you what it means to be American, and I am one. Fuck, I wore our uniform for eight years and I still can’t really tell you what it means to be American. I have never met a French person who couldn’t tell you what it means to be French. That Cathedral lies at the heart of their capital city and, in many ways, at the heart of their nation. The French people would never allow it lie fallow and turn to dust, and it’s pretty deplorable that a country of people who all but lack a unified identity think we have the cultural savvy to dictate to another nation what should become of a structure that is four times older than our entire being. We cannot comprehend why the French would pay millions to fix a church that old, in part because we literally cannot comprehend what it means to have a national history that old. If we could, the donations of billionaires would probably make a lot more sense to us.

“Really? Flint still doesn’t have drinking water and this is what people are spending their money on?”

I live in Cleveland. The lead levels in certain neighborhoods in my city are exponentially higher than those in Flint. If you’re using Flint as an excuse to avoid spending money on other things, you’re showing your own bias and overall lack of knowledge on a topic that is much bigger than the buzzword you’ve turned the city of Flint into. My city is not the only one like this, either. There are dozens (probably hundreds) of cities in this country that have lead levels higher than those in Flint. We just don’t have an exceptionally annoying movie producer named Michael Moore capable of throwing an international temper tantrum about the situation. I’m thrilled that he got the attention that he did and that he forced Flint’s officials to at least admit wrong doing, even if they still haven’t fixed the problem. Pretending that the water in Flint is as bad as it gets, though, is seriously disingenuous and shows just how thoroughly even some of the most obnoxious elitists don’t understand their own talking points. Come on guys. Do your research.

In the end, telling people what they can be upset about isn’t just bad politics, it’s bad interpersonal dialogue. It presumes that the person you’re talking to is incapable of considering multiple major world issues as important at the same time. It presumes that the person you’re accusing of not caring “properly” has access to the same time and resources that you do, and presumes that your own personal international interests are the most important ones out there. Yes, the war in Syria is important. So is the famine in Yemen. But so are five million other things going on right now, and you are not the arbiter of that which is “most” important.

There will come a day when something big, and important, will happen to you. Maybe it’ll be a car accident. Maybe it’ll be a birth. Maybe it’ll be a deployment. Maybe it’ll be an explosion that leaves half a city block leveled. It will be the center point of your existence for as long as you need it to be. Maybe people from outside of your town will care, maybe they won’t. That doesn’t matter, though, because the event in question is important to you. Now imagine how disheartening it would be if you got online and hundreds of thousands of people were discussing the fact that whatever happened in your corner of the planet was irrelevant because of all the other things happening in other parts of the planet. Just as we went back to ignoring Syria a couple weeks after each bombing run, just as we’ve long since forgotten that the war in Iraq ever even happened or that the one in Afghanistan is still on-going, just as we’ve forgotten that Puerto Rico is still rebuilding and that Venezuela is still falling apart, in a couple of weeks we will forget about Notre Dame. And then each of us, as individuals, will be free to go back to our separate corners of the internet and focus on the things that we find important.

Until then, calm down. Get off the net if you have to. Liberals have enough problems without a subsection of our own deciding they’re solely and singularly qualified to determine what major world events are actually worth talking about and giving money to. You don’t know everything. None of us do. So how about if we just don’t act like a bunch of elitist dicks and let people care about whatever the hell they want to care about.

Including the fact that the stain glass windows survived that fucking fire. Props to 13th century artisans.

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