volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@michael_martinez Yes, that is largely the point, Biden said that he was honoring the agreement, but he wasn't because the agreement was already broken.

Biden claimed he was honoring the agreement but that was a lie that Biden told.

We need to call him out on that, he screwed up and tried to blame someone else for his own screw up.

And in addition to screwing up, he lied to the American people.

So the point is I agree with you that he makes bad decisions, but we need to emphasize that he needs to be held accountable for his decisions, including not letting him lie to get out of that by blaming an agreement that no longer existed.

@Lassielmr I just frankly don't see much point in purely symbolic actions.

If the original comment above laid out a way that there would be substantial, concrete improvement. Then I would want to hear about that, but if they are complaining that somebody didn't make the right symbolic gestures, well...

@alexlac51

@PixelChonk I think the problem is that so many Palestinians seem on board with anti-LGBT positions.

I think you said above that people are confused because they are focusing on that aspect of their cause.

So like me personally, I can't back them due to that, even if I was opposed to the Israeli actions, I also can't sign on to the anti-LGBT Palestinian cause either.

But I can say we need to do something to stop the suffering of one even if I'm not supporting some of the ones positions.

@mnutty you said they didn't prevent Trump from returning to office.

So he's in?

@juddlegum but without context a profit statement doesn't say much at all.

Profit, revenues minus costs, is a calculation after all, and we don't know without context what went into the calculation.

@PixelChonk so I think maybe rhetoric could be improved if people spoke more in terms of being against the military action than speaking in favor of a group of people with problematic positions.

I constantly hear phrasing like pro-palestine so it's not surprising that others get the impression that the Palestinian cause is being agreed to or promoted.

It's a confusing rhetoric being used.

@Aethelstan ha, I don't know if you disagree 🙂

If it's not about the person and the person's power, well we might be in agreement.

It's just, I wouldn't distract by talking about person if it's not about the person! 🙂

In the end, the reason why this is so important to me is because every person voting for their own representative needs to consider the actions of their own representative and not just focus on a Speaker or majority leader, as all too often, that ends up being a scapegoat before the representatives to hide behind and escape accountability.

Like right now I think we should be yelling holy hell at every democratic representative that voted along with the nut jobs to get this guy elected speaker in the first place. We should be voting a ton of them out of office, but we're not going to, in part because we're too busy focused on the Speaker based on stories of powers that the speaker doesn't actually have.

It's very frustrating to me, the way the people who are actively responsible, get to get a pass and get reelected to do it again based on this kind of rhetoric.

@NewsDesk

@sim Well put

@sim interesting, thanks.

I'll try to keep that in mind.

@Lassielmr but that still misses my question of how would it play out? What would happen?

It sounds like you're asking for a symbolic gesture, fine, but what would it do? Just be purely symbolic?

@alexlac51

@moira hm it's entirely possible that the bashing is happening just where I don't normally see it.

But yeah, especially on social media I see him being taken seriously with people promoting their interpretations of his words, so that's just the sample that I end up seeing. Also, outfits like BBC and NPR seem to also buy in to the interpretations of his words.

So yeah maybe late night shows are calling him out, and I hope they are.

@sim I thought the point of the shitposter.club instance was shit posts, so this post sounds awfully serious and I'm not sure how to take it.

Is that instance not actually all about shit posts?

@PixelChonk Well, I think there is a contrast with a third option, which is being opposed to the Israeli actions without necessarily being in favor of the intolerant positions of many on the Palestinian side.

Often enough in this world we can say that at least both sides can be wrong for different reasons, but more realistically, that on the whole list just more complicated.

But at the least, a person might simply oppose one side without signing on to the side of the other.

@Aethelstan but it's not up to him.

You might as well be asking whether Johnson is up for us having spaghetti for dinner tonight.

Under the US government system and the rules of the House, the Speaker doesn't get to decide that.

It doesn't matter whether he is up for that or not any more than it matters whether he is up for whatever I want to eat tonight or not. It's not his call.

And I think we really need to stop portraying these individuals as so powerful because it lets a bunch of other politicians off the hook for their own actions.

@NewsDesk

@BlueWave_Surfer@mastodon.social no because when I talk about holding Democrats responsible for what they have done, use somehow pivoted to talking about Republicans and what things have not been done.

You're still letting them off the hook.

@moira sorry for the double reply but I had one more example along the same line:

I remember how during Trump's early campaigns he managed to put together some words that would indicate a position that wasn't in keeping with Republican positions because he was too damn stupid to know what the Republican position was.

Later he would correct his position, and Republicans would pretend like it was what he said all along, but the unfortunate thing was that Trump's opponents would play along as well, bashing the guy for having the normal Republican position instead of pointing out that his position had waffled.

So it's the same sort of thing: The guy is really empowered by how we all handle him, how we all overlook just how empty and vapid he is instead of puncturing that balloon.

But then, a lot of politicians and organizations profit off of attacking him as a strong man instead of pointing out that he's really not one.

@moira I think the problem is the way so many people, both his supporters and especially his detractors paper over this.

Like, Trump mumbles out some word salad and as you said, his supporters mix that into some message that they want to hear and they cheer for it. But what do his critics do? They also mix it into some message that they can get their side to yell against. I really wish the critics would bash the guy for not being able to speak English.

I think it would do a whole lot more to deflate Trump by calling him out for not being able to put together coherent thoughts than to pretend like he's putting together solid proposals that are just bad.

(And yes, through this I am saying not able to, but you can read that as not willing to)

Trump's supporters are always going to take him seriously, but the rest of us give him way too much credit when we don't lampoon him for being unable to speak.

I really think that in all this time we should have been calling him out, especially for the times. He's botched the conservative perspective, saying things that go against Republicans because he's just that damn stupid, but we gave him a pass when really we should have been highlighting things that would have eroded his support on the right.

@CuriousMagpie@mastodon.social Well, I do think we need to separate the ideas of reflecting the preferences of the population from weather. Those preferences are actually good or bad or rooted in fact.

Like it's entirely democratic to vote to spend money appeasing the flying spaghetti monster if a large portion of the population honestly believe in FSM. That doesn't mean that portion of the population is educated well, but it's still democracy at work to come to that conclusion.

But yes, I absolutely emphatically say that the information issue is a core problem that outweighs so many other things people worry about.

Like it doesn't matter how districts are gerrymandered if all of the people in the districts don't know what's happening anyway.

@Teri_Kanefield