volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@realTuckFrumper fortunately we don't rely on Speaker of the House to dictate science policy.

He might also have awful taste in food, and similarly we don't count on him for a restaurant recommendations.

We really need to stop inflating the roles that these politicians play.

@alexlac51 so the second question, how do you see that working out?

@alexlac51 I mean, what would you have had him do, and exactly how do you see that working out?

@BlueWave_Surfer@mastodon.social and so instead Democrats voted so that we got this guy as a replacement.

Again, let's hold Democrats accountable for what Democrats did.

We can't let them get a pass by focusing purely on what Republicans do. Republicans are going to be awful, fine. But we need to hold Democrats responsible for what Democrats do, especially when they amplify that awfulness.

You don't like how Republicans are protecting Trump or whatever? Fine! Let's hold Democrats responsible for actively promoting that with their votes.

@BlueWave_Surfer@mastodon.social I appreciate your consistency in trying to focus on things other than Democrats' actions, but I really do think they need to be held accountable for what they did.

Heck, It sounds like you are quite opposed to Republican perspectives, so you should be especially interested with holding Democrats responsible for empowering them.

If Democrats had not actively chosen to vote the way they did, this speaker would not have been elected.

If you don't like this speaker, great, let's make sure to hold Democrats responsible for actively voting such that he got elected.

@timberwraith I mean, history debunks those claims.

Political instability in the region long proceeded the oil boom.

@SocraticEthics "Starlink will provide communications for internationally recognised humanitarian organisations"

That's a pretty darn important piece of context left out of the post.

@david_colquhoun but what does creating graduate quality jobs mean? Sounds like it's overlooking the very purpose of jobs in the first place.

@BlueWave_Surfer@mastodon.social of course it works that way. It's written right there in the rules that govern the selection of a speaker.

Democrats voted with the Republican nut jobs to to kick out McCarthy and then declined to support any electable moderate candidate, setting the stage for this election through their voting strategy.

So the whole House elected this guy and maybe if we held Democratic representatives more accountable for their actions we would have had a better result.

So long as we let them off the hook, well, we got the government we were voting for.

@BlueWave_Surfer@mastodon.social we really need to emphasize that the Speaker of the House is elected by the whole House, while parties elect minority and majority leaders.

If the general public realized that maybe we could have pushed our elected representatives to work together and find a consensus candidate.

@napocornejo specifically, which crimes have they committed?

@Viking Yeah, I think Wendover's videos have taken a drop in quality trending toward opinion rather than fact lately.

@nando161 not to mention, what the hell? It's insane to even think that a presidential election would mean a genocide in the US.

That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

So it's a stupid comparison against something that's not even real anyway.

@bohwaz I imagine it's more like put on the back burner when the costs of joining ended up far bigger than expected.

@michael_martinez again, the Taliban broke Trump's agreement by acting against Americans.

So there was no longer an agreement on the table. Biden was not honoring Trump's agreement because the agreement had already been broken.

Biden acted on his own. He bears responsibility for his own actions regardless of the agreement, and further, despite the agreement. He cannot blame the agreement for multiple reasons.

And it's not that Biden kept Trump's policies in place, racist or not. The way the US government works every single thing that happens since inauguration day was Biden's policy. Every single thing the US government does right now is under the authority of Biden.

I'm emphasizing this for a particular reason: each president needs to be held accountable for what they do, and they should not be allowed to act as if they passively maintained somebody else's policies. No, it's important to stress the way the US government works, each President is responsible for what happens in their administration, they are active participants in everything that happens.

From inauguration day on these were no longer Trump's policies but Biden's policies. At the most we can say that Biden continued to implement policies similar to Trump's.

But he has to own that, whether a person likes the policies or not.

@michael_martinez ha, at least in the environment of that particular conservative audience the uncontroversial position is to say yes, of course they would pardon Trump. Pence took the incredibly controversial position of saying he would look at all the facts. :)

But your comment kind of dovetails into what I was saying about looking at the actual roles officials play as they serve their function as cogs in the machine.

Firstly, Biden DIDN'T honor Trump's agreement with the Taliban, as the Taliban broke the agreement first, and everything that's happening now is due to Biden's actions as active head of the executive branch.

I'd say people don't know where Biden stands on things just because the state of reporting these days is so bad that hardly anyone knows what's going on in the world at all.

There's so much misinformation out there that the general public is generally unaware of where anybody stands.

@f00fc7c8 I'd say the key in your post was the word asking.

So often a person sees inconsistency and hypocrisy because they don't actually understand what's going on, and they need to ask and listen to the answer before judging.

Well, and it's the whole method of repeating somebody's stance back to them to confirm that it has been understood.

Sadly, so much negativity in the world these days comes from people who simply don't understand each other, who haven't taken time to understand the other person.

@michael_martinez Well consider the guy in terms of his actual job and his position in the machinery of the federal government separate from his personal opinions.

I think a lot of his way of doing things really reflected his role as a cog in the machine.

As VP he believed his job description involved supporting the president (which is a belief that is pretty common in the US and that I personally disagree with, but whatever) so he did his best to do his job at the time. And then his job became to count the electoral college votes, so he did that.

Now he is applying for the job of president and he believes that job description includes looking hard at the facts before deciding whether to pardon a person or not, and for the sake of doing that job, he declared that he would not issue an opinion before all of the facts were on the table.

I really think that Pence is the sort of person who focuses on what his actual job is, what the job description actually says he's supposed to do, and he has a long history of demonstrating that.

That is reflective of law and order.

But yeah, he hasn't run about declaring that Trump is a threat to democracy in part because that's not his job, and the guy really focuses on what he thinks his job is.

@keremgo3d@masto.ai I figure they are trying to follow the facebook model and trying to grow through network effects, people sending each other invites means the network will be more cohesive as it grows.

For better or worse.

@Dianepatterson what's to look into?

Have you never met a religious person?