@SameGirlie

Keep in mind that Congress wrote their appropriations bills based on reliance that these student loans would be paid back.

By law, Congress regularly cites these payments as part of the legal budget, no different from any other tax.

Biden cannot legally decline to collect this money any more than he can just decide not to collect corporate taxes any more.

That these student loan payments are part of the legal funding of government is a point all too often overlooked.

@freemo

@volkris @SameGirlie @freemo Forgiving a loan is spending. Only the House can spend. Biden has no right to forgive a loan without an appropriations bill.

@mike805 @volkris @SameGirlie

Excellent point. Regardless of who appointed the supreme court it clearly was not within Biden's legal right to do so no matter how you cut it.

@freemo @volkris @SameGirlie People have tried to cheat on their taxes by getting a "loan" from their corporation that they own, and then forgiving the loan or just extending the terms indefinitely at zero interest, which is the same thing. They got busted for tax fraud. This is no different.

@freemo @mike805 @volkris

Absolute Garbage. Fox News Talking Points. The plan stands, both under the HEROES Act and under the Health & Education Act.

And you all know it. C'yez

@SameGirlie

Not everyone having a mature conversation with a difference of opinion is gaslighting, please stop being hyperbolic.

If you'd care to elaborate on what you mean I'd love to hear you out. But your response is far too short for me to know what you mean.

@mike805 @volkris

@freemo @SameGirlie @volkris Context missing, did someone delete a toot here?

@mike805

No SameGirlie rage quit and blocked you and everyone else int he thread.

@SameGirlie @volkris

@freemo @SameGirlie @volkris Oh well, that's called losing the argument.

@mike805 @SameGirlie @volkris
Your opinion cant be very valuable if you didnt even bother to consider dissenting opinions in forming it... I just call it being ignorant, at least when the conversation is otherwise mature.

@freemo @SameGirlie @volkris From what I've seen, the USA in particular is so divided that many people - maybe most - will just shut down when they conclude that you are "one of them." I run into this on noc.social as well when the subject of global warming comes up. There is a resident doomist on there, and he will not discuss the HOW of it. Just "we must stop using fossil fuels right now!"

@mike805

Yes hyper-polarization in the USA tends to result in people being very aggressive against anyone with a more nuanced or middle road opinion than their own. Its very tiring.

@SameGirlie @volkris

@freemo @SameGirlie @volkris I've actually been accused of "both sides ism" on here. Yeah, I think the American political system is like one of those puppet shows where the puppeteer has one on each hand and they argue with each other.

The issues they argue about all have one thing in common: they are not important to the financier class.

@mike805

Yea anytime you add even a smidge of nuance to a conversation its "both sidism"... being in the USA is like being in a mental institution where no one is getting treated.

Do Americans even realize how they are seen as the laughing stock of the rest of the world, both left and right politically?

@SameGirlie @volkris

@freemo @SameGirlie @volkris America ought to be taken seriously as a threat by the rest of the world. If you look into it, a lot of the Bad Things of the 20th century were partly caused by Americans who thought they knew how to run the world.

American progressives thought they could create utopia by getting into WW1, and they set up a future disaster. Around the same time, some people in New York, with a similar worldview, were funding the Bolsheviks, setting up the other big disaster to come.

@freemo @SameGirlie @volkris After the war, the "Frankfurt school" was allowed to set up shop here, leading to our current educational madhouse. And on the other political side, we thought we could win a civil war in Vietnam and elsewhere.

Inside every (blank) there is usually NOT an American trying to get out! Germany and Japan were special cases, not the norm.

@mike805 @freemo @SameGirlie @volkris

If only good old Teddy Adorno had been nearly as effective as Mr Reaganomics in shaping the educational system …
https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/

@mike805 @freemo @SameGirlie @volkris

Japan and West, eventually reunified, Germany were huge success stories,
because
Marshall and MacArthur (relieved just in time by Truman)
prevailed over
McNamara and Morgenthau (also relieved just in time by Truman).

The neocons (and their predecessors) really f$cked up Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and vicinity.

@tatzelbrumm @freemo @SameGirlie @volkris Well also.. Germany was a very civilized country taken over by some evil people, and most of the evil people were dead by then. A lot of Germans did not like the jackbooted thug nature of the Nazis, although they liked the winning while it lasted.

In Japan, people were thoroughly trained to obey authorities. So when their Emperor said "this is the new boss" they went along.

The countries we have tried to fix since then were never that civilized.

@mike805
cc:
@freemo @SameGirlie @volkris
How, do you come to the conclusion that the Frankfurt School led to the current US educational madhouse?

I'm puzzled because I have found an Asylum for the Homeless¹⁸ Intellectual⁸³
(more like "The Outside of the Asylum"
[https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/The_Outside_of_the_Asylum])
from an educational system gone mad after Reagan put the wrecking ball to it.

And I'm even extensively quoting (Old) Frankfurt School luminary Theodor W. Adorno
for #TROLLING the contemporary Frankfurt School headmistress in the kitchen downstairs:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10227966250966172&set=p.10227966250966172&type=3
[might be shadowbanned by Facebook]:

Just for #TROLLING¹⁹⁹⁵:

In your Refuge for the Homeless¹⁸
let yourself be inspired by the Hausgeist
[English: house spirit, Latin: genius loci]
to consult Theodor W. Adorno's Minima Moralia
"8. If bad boys should tempt you"⁸,
to open the cookbook of a famous aunt on page 8
to get a reference to yet another cookbook*,
whose existence illustrates the problem
that bad boys think that women belong in the kitchen,
and by an extremely serendipitous coincidence,
on the title page, you find the name of her bad boy nephew.

* https://www.booklooker.de/B%C3%BCcher/Angebote/titel=Was+M%C3%A4nnern+so+gut+schmeckt

8. If bad boys should tempt you. – There is an amor intellectualis [Latin: abstract love] for the kitchen staff, the temptation for those who work theoretically or artistically, to relax the intellectual [geistigen] claim on oneself, to lower one’s niveau, to follow all manner of platitudes in the matter [Sache] and expression, which one had rejected as an alert appraiser. Since no categories, not even that of cultivation [Bildung: education], can be proscribed to intellectuals anymore, and a thousand demands of hustle and bustle endanger the concentration, the effort of producing something with a measure of integrity is so great, that scarcely anyone is still capable of it. The pressure of conformity, which burdens everyone who produces something, furthers lowers their demands on themselves. The center of intellectual [geistigen] self-discipline as such is understood to be disintegrating. The taboos which comprised the intellectual [geistigen] stature of a human being, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated recognitions, direct themselves continuously against one’s own impulses, which one learned to condemn, which however are so strong, that only an unquestioning and unquestionable juridics [Instanz] can halt them. What applies to the life of the instinctual drives, applies no less to the life of the mind: the painter and composer, who forbid themselves the use of this or that color combination or chord contrast as kitschy, the author who finds that a linguistic configuration gets on their nerves as banal or pedantic, react so forcefully because there are layers within them which are drawn by such. The rejection of the hegemonic overgrowth of culture presumes that one has participated enough in the latter to feel it in one’s fingertips, as it were, simultaneously drawing from this participation the forces to dismiss it. These forces, which make their appearance as such in individual resistance, are for that reason by no means of a merely individual sort. The intellectual conscience, in which they are integrated, has a social moment so much as the moral superego. It crystallizes in the conception [Vorstellung] of the right society and its citizens. If this conception is set aside – and who could still blindly subscribe to it – then the intellectual compulsion towards the bottom loses its inhibitions, and all the junk which the barbaric culture has left behind in the individuated [Individuum] comes into view: half-education, laxness, cloddish trustfulness, shoddiness. Mostly it is rationalized as humanity, as the wish to make oneself understandable to other human beings, as cosmopolitan responsibility. But the sacrifice of intellectual self-discipline is borne far too easily, to really believe that it is indeed one. This is drastically evident when observing intellectuals whose material situation has changed: as soon as they have convinced themselves even the slightest bit that they must earn a living by writing and nothing else, they send the same junk into the world, down to the last nuances, which in their lusher times they once denounced with the utmost ferocity. Entirely like formerly wealthy emigres, who can finally be as greedy in foreign lands as they always wanted to be at home, so do those who are impoverished in Spirit [Geiste] march enthusiastically into the hell, which is their heaven.
[https://criticaltheoryresearchnetwork.com/2017/06/17/adorno-minima-moralia-1-8-bad-boys-tempt-1944/]

18. https://archinect.com/forum/thread/147736192/refuge-for-the-homeless-theodor-adorno-minima-moralia-1951

83. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/4657-vice-president-by-theodor-adorno

1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzing#Automated_bug_triage

@tatzelbrumm@qoto.org @mike805 @freemo @SameGirlie @volkris

Finding the actual link to the TROLLING paper is left as an exercise to the (hopefully not dependent on a post-Reagan US college) student. ;-)

@tatzelbrumm @freemo @SameGirlie @volkris They infected the American education system with Critical Theory, from what I've read.

@freemo

Meh, it's one of those terms that I'd just go ahead and own.

"Why yes, I am engaging in both-sidism because I can about sorting out what's true, and I can think critically and hold two ideas in my head at one time. You don't, or you can't?"

@mike805 @SameGirlie

@volkris @freemo @SameGirlie Yes I do. I genuinely do not fully agree with either political side. I think if you gave either the far Right or the far Left a dictatorship you'd be in hell soon enough. Horseshoe theory is real - both of those extremes are nuts and want to impose their crazy by force on everyone else.

@mike805 @volkris @SameGirlie

Both sidism may be bad if you amplify both sides indiscriminately.. it is never bad to listen to both sides though.

@mike805 @freemo @SameGirlie @volkris

If you lose an argument, you should lose in style.

@tatzelbrumm

I want a t-shirt that says "Everyone I dont like is Hitler"

@mike805 @SameGirlie @volkris

@freemo

Wooow, I see her ragequit reply, where she effectively said "nu uh!" and insisted that we all knew she was right.

I would assume she's one that has outstanding student loans so she has a vested interest in loan forgiveness.

And so I'd guess that the education she wants us all to pay for didn't exactly do her thinking skills a world of good.

I wonder if she ever ragequit a class... and how that worked out for her.

@mike805 @SameGirlie

@volkris @mike805 @SameGirlie

Possibly.. honestly looking at her garbage of a feed she looks like someone who is pretty radicalized/polarized in general.. She probably rage quits on anyone who disagrees with her even a tiny bit.

@mike805

No, forgiving a loan is not spending. That's getting the math backwards.

If I don't bring in money I haven't spent. Wrong side of the balance sheet. My lack of income isn't an expense; it's a lack of income.

Yes, sometimes people engage in legal or accounting fictions surrounding this, but I think we need to push back and remember when we're speaking in convenient analogies.

It's like saying if I don't mug my neighbor I've lost the $100 that's in his pocket. No, that's just funky accounting.

@SameGirlie @freemo

@volkris @mike805 @SameGirlie

If I give you 100$ as a loan, and then the loan disapears, all I did was spend 100$ on you.

The fact that you have to dish out the money first to make a loan is exactly why it is spending.

@freemo

They are two different transactions.

You spend money to me purchasing the idea that I'll pay back the loan with interest.

I spend money to you when I write you a check in exchange for retiring my debt.

The fact that I might not write those checks (I might die or drag us through court or have a president unilaterally declare that I don't have to) shows that those are independent transactions.

In this case, the US already spent the money on these loans. For better or worse. That's over and done with.

Now the issue is whether debtors pay back into the US Treasury as per the legal obligation, so it's no longer about the US spending but rather the US receiving.

@mike805 @SameGirlie