OBJECTION!

Terrifying. Immigration courts need to be abolished altogether.

Same, but in reverse 🤝

This thread is full of the most absolutely bizarre takes imaginable.

The war in Afghanistan was a complete failure from start to finish and was only ever about making more money for arms manufacturers and oil companies. At literally any point in the decades long occupation, the best thing to do would be to immediately withdraw. The decision to withdraw was one of the best policy decisions any president has made in my lifetime (an admittedly low bar). I was hoping and praying for that decision for literally 20 years of my life. Personally, I’d tend to credit Biden with it since he was the one who actually followed through and accepted the political fallout from all the psychopathic hawks in the media.

And I come in here and the two sides are, “Biden good because [incredibly good and necessary decision] was actually Trump’s fault!” vs “Biden bad because [incredibly good and necessary decision] was Biden’s fault!”

How on earth has everyone in here come to this conclusion that if we prolonged the war even another 20 years, we could accomplish something we completely and utterly failed to do in that time? Even our own puppet government was telling us to leave. If you want to blame someone for losing the war, blame Bush, because the war was already lost within the first year at most. I literally cannot comprehend how anyone could look at that situation and want us to stay unless they were directly profiting from it.

Rationally, I know that liberals are bloodthirsty warmongerers who worship Khorne and want to build mountains of skulls and all, but like aren’t you supposed to keep up some kind of pretence of not just wanting to turn a country into a perpetual slaughterhouse?

And I think the bans were right in retrospect because the timed (not typically perma) bans expired

Lol, no they weren’t/didn’t.

and those people still magically disappeared completely from Lemmy after the election.

Lol, no we didn’t.

running from their wartime fighting obligations because they’re a family of cowards.

Dodging drafts is the only cool thing any Trump has ever done, actually.

Yeah, but on the off chance aliens pick him up and he’s their first contact, they’d probably destroy the planet.

On the one hand, half of the US economy is tied up directly or indirectly in the supply of goods to maintain the US military, and cutting a significant portion of that will go down badly in myriad ways.

This is nonsense, because cutting the military frees up funds to be spent on things that are actually productive. If you spend a billion dollars on bombs, those bombs blow up and now you have nothing. If you spent it on, say, a grocery store, then that grocery store can generate revenue and not only support itself but provide profits in return. And there are lots of things the government can spend on that are better than that, for example, public transit can boost the economy in a whole area which in turn provides greater tax revenue.

On the other hand, the US has made a lot of enemies of late, as well as souring the relationships with it’s allies by generally being an international cunt in all the ways we can all describe in detail.

Which is all the more reason drastic reductions in the military are necessary. Such an action would demonstrate goodwill to the world.

The US is already spending more than the next 9 countries combined. We could cut the military budget literally in half and still be easily outspending China and Russia combined.

Nobody wants to fuck with the US. Nobody would want to fuck with a country half as powerful of the US. People fight the US because we force them to fight. Virtually every geopolitical “threat” is painstakingly maintained by Washington, because after all, if there weren’t enough threats, there’d be more eyes on military spending. And the primary purpose of military spending is essentially money laundering, funnelling public funds into private hands where it can then make its way back to the politicians.

Do you think Iran is going to be more likely to cause trouble if the US stops fucking with them? Venezuela, Yemen, Cuba, Palestine, China? That’s nonsense. The overwhelming majority of these supposed “threats” are people who want to live their lives in peace but we keep trying to provoke them. The only case you could try to make is Russia, which represents a tiny fraction of US spending either way.

The only thing we would really need European support for is for wars of aggression, like Iran, where they could provide diplomatic cover. What actual scenario are you imagining here? Chinese troops land in California and the EU says “deal with it?” Pure fantasy.

There is exactly one serious, existential threat to the US and that is the domestic threat posed by the far right. Providing QoL improvements is the best way to both keep them out of power by winning political points, and to avoid radicalization by getting people something to feel invested in. Military spending does virtually nothing to protect us from the only real threat we face.

So let me get this straight. You think that if someone, anyone really, thinks that the president might have violated a law, they should be immediately thrown in jail until it’s resolved? Even the cleanest person in the world would be spending their entire term in a jail cell.

That’s not how anything works.

It’s very debatable whether he actually broke the law in this instance. Attacking Iran without congressional approval is allowed by the War Powers Resolution of 1973. The argument against that is that the powers outlined in that resolution are meant to be “emergency powers” but “emergency powers” are very easy to invoke and I’m not aware of any precedent of a president not being permitted to invoke them. And the US hasn’t formally declared war since WWII, so they’re invoked fairly often.

Getting more clearly restrictive laws in place would be a good thing, and getting Republicans on record as opposing them is only mostly useless (look, it’s a low bar) because it does at least make it a little harder for them to pass themselves off as “antiwar.”

People are reacting to the headline, but the article is basically the opposite of what most people assume. This is The Atlanic. Their problem is that the Democrats aren’t doing enough austerity.

Tbf, the US is heading towards a debt crisis. However, the reason for that is because of the absurdly bloated military budget and pointless adventurism, while the article frames it entirely in terms of “taxes are too low and we spend too much on social programs.” How are the Democrats supposed to win without promising the voters anything? This is never addressed. But that’s apparently the lesson the author thinks they should learn. Run on austerity, if you somehow manage to win, prioritize the debt - and then when they inevitably lose the next election because everyone’s lives got worse, the Republicans will have more money to play with to fund things like ICE and the Iran War.

It’s nonsense. Winning means promising QoL improvements and following through on them. Yeah the debt is a problem, but that’s exactly why military cuts are necessary. Trying to solve the debt problem just creates a political problem, it’s the sort of thing to worry about once you’ve already secured power.

You’re just attacking me, not my argument

No, I’m pretty clearly attacking your argument. Your argument rests on this assumption that if allowing denial of service based on race only affects minorities <5% of the population, that that makes it acceptable somehow. It’s a horrible position but the fact that it reflects very poorly on you to voice it is beside the point.

You skipped the whole counter argument (comparing to scabs and unions) that this lacks the social structure to support that behavior. If you tried to open a business that wasn’t racist then the racist people would come and threaten you, this isn’t happening with the Uber situation.

Regardless, the Civil Rights Act applies to all businesses. It doesn’t matter if you think one particular business model makes the Civil Rights Act unnecessary - it is still the law. And opening up exceptions to it would set a dangerous precedent.

The thing is that Uber is not performing any discrimination, they are enabling other people to discriminate against each other and attempting to still provide service through it. Claiming that Uber is discriminating is functionally not true.

It doesn’t matter either way. “Discriminating” and “enabling discrimination” are both illegal. I have no idea why you’re so attached to this legal technicality of “contractors” that Uber uses to skirt labor laws, because it doesn’t even change anything here. Declaring someone a contractor does not magically repeal the Civil Rights Act.

The scale at which you would have to be a minority for this to impact you significantly is somewhere in the 1-5% range

OK, so you need to reach a threshold of 5% of the population before you’re allowed to have rights, got it.

with the assumption that the other 95-99% are opposed to you.

That assumption isn’t actually necessary.

Let’s say there’s a small town where 65% are non-racist (or less racist) whites, 30% are racist whites, and 5% are black. If your diner decides to serve that 5%, the 30% of racists will refuse to eat there, and you’ll end up losing a lot of customers. So, rather than “95-99%” needing to be opposed to you, it only needs to be the case that your population is outnumbered by the people who hate you - which is the case for many minority groups in many places in the country.

A diner not serving black people is impactful because a handful of people are the business owners and are effectively gating you out.

That’s not really true. If if was just a matter of a handful of business owners being racists, then those racist businesses would be out-competed by non-racist businesses that appeal to everyone. The problem was wider and more systemic, being welcoming to everyone would cause racists to boycott the business, so even if a business owner wasn’t racist themselves, they would be incentivized to ban the people who the racists hated.

This also goes both ways and is potentially international, Japanese could choose not to serve non-Japanese, a black person could choose not to serve white people for comfort or security.

You’re fundamentally not understanding why Uber allowing people to make this decision is not the same as 1960’s segregation.

Because it isn’t! The scenario you described is literally the exact sort of thing the Civil Rights Act exists to stop! You are literally advocating for allowing denial of service based on protected classes!

So long as the option goes both ways this only hurts the people who opt into the program, not everyone else. The only way this could hurt others would be if those who choose to opt in (as in they only want a certain thing) get priority in the scheduling or if you live somewhere where you are the overwhelming minority.

So the only way it could hurt anyone is if they’re a minority. Yes, that’s exactly why we have the Civil Rights Act and why what you’re suggesting is illegal.

In the second example, if you are still living in a sun down town then getting Uber rides is probably not your biggest problem.

Next you’re going to tell me that black people in racist towns should just eat at home if restaurants don’t want to serve them. And if the bus driver makes you sit at the back of the bus, just drive a car.

Even now, Uber drivers are independent contractors

This is a bullshit legal category that exists primarily to exploit loopholes, but even that does not give anyone the right to discriminate and violate the Civil Rights Act.

If the driver pulls up and thinks you’re sketchy they can cancel the ride, there is no obligation.

Strictly speaking, if a driver cancelled every ride that a black person booked, they could be sued for it, although such a suit would be very difficult in practice because you’d have to have enough records of that driver (or the company, if that was the target of the suit) to show a consistent bias.

This is the case in every business. Denial of service based on protected classes is illegal.

So you disagree with the Civil Rights Act then? Because one of the things it did was force businesses to serve customers, regardless of things like race or sex. And before we had it, there where large parts of the South where black people would be refused service, and if someone did serve them, they’d lose a bunch of white customers.

That’s the very good reason why it’s “not already an option.”

Neither drivers nor Uber have the right, or should have the right, to refuse service based on categories protected in the Civil Rights Act.

Because The Atlantic cannot publish a single article without including a brain-meltingly awful take in it.

McCarthyism to the tenth power

The main job of a conservative influencer is to come up with new ways of saying, “I think we should do the Holocaust” that are palatable to suburbanites.

What a shit take. That’s like saying, “I don’t know how the Church thinks the Inquisition will go when they’ve deviated so far from Jesus’ teachings themselves,” or “I don’t know how Hitler thinks gassing the Jews will work when he has Jewish ancestors himself.”

It doesn’t fucking matter. They can pick whatever label they like, communist, heretic, immigrant, Jew, whatever, and apply it to whoever they feel like and not apply it to whoever they don’t feel like. You are an absolute rube if you think this sort of “gotcha” will slow them down in any way, you’re literally accepting their framing by doing that.