It's a vibes-based invective liberals use the same way chuds use "woke" to dispel any cognitive dissonance that might crop up whenever they discover information they find displeasing because it might mean the rest of the delusions they're immersed in might not be all that airtight. Just a thought-terminating word with absolutely no meaning. Just like "whataboutism," it's a weasel's way out of addressing someone else's argument in good faith (which I have yet to see you display in this thread).
Personally, it's absolutely fucking hilarious to see how much these words get thrown around, especially when it comes from so-called "leftists." If you truly are one, you ought to quit it with that bullshit.
Damn, I was just looking to post a rant about this because a couple of stores near me started up with this shit in the last few weeks and I was seething over it because of how reactionary and sad it is. One store locked up entire aisles of household goods, toiletries, and medicine. The other just has a couple of brands of laundry detergents, cleaners, and pills locked behind glass. Now I require a personal shopper to come along with me to open up multiple cabinets so I can buy laundry detergent, mouthwash, deodorant, razors, and allergy meds. What if I need to look at labels? What if I decide I don't want something? Do I need to flag several employees to open each of the cages? It's not like these places are (or will be) staffed with enough people for there to be constant coverage of these cordoned off areas.
Best of all, both stores that did this by me are all-self-checkout deals with maybe one manned register, so any enterprising person could still simply pocket whatever they want after freeing it from its cage. This is in the US btw, in a "progressive" northeast city and state.
So glad these chains pushed out all the smaller, locally-owned competition so there's nowhere else to go unless you waste time shopping around for stores outside your neighborhood that don't deserve to be burned to the ground for this type of garbage, and go out of your way to get to them. So happy to live in a city where the few indoor spaces I go these days have become so openly hostile to everyone it makes me want to just order everything online.
I decided not to set foot into these places now, though I'm starting to think it'd be better praxis to go in and waste everyone's time by incessantly reading every label on every product and comparison shopping while they have to stand there the whole time with the cases open. Or get a bunch of items then decide later that I don't want them and leave them on random shelves. Or decide I need to "call" someone to confirm this was the ointment I was supposed to pick up, then read off the ingredients just to be sure.
Nothing disingenuous about it. Biden’s entire shtick was about following the science and doing the right thing (and being able to win over Republicans on controversial issues, that was the whole reason why we couldn't gamble on anyone else) and he almost immediately tossed that out and adopted his predecessor’s “ignore it and it’ll go away” attitude. The White House pushed a vax-only approach which was proven to be ineffective before he even took office and then went out to brunch. For fuck’s sake, the man had to be publicly shamed into sending out masks and tests during a surge his feckless ass engendered because he pretended the pandemic was over in April 2021, when less than half of the adult population got their first round of shots.
I'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt considering how poorly even the states that did give half a fuck in 2020 were managing and there is no doubt that it is a complex job, but once you start mimicking the guy you lambasted a few months prior for exacerbating the problem (not to mention spending the next year and a half prematurely stripping people of basic protections and the ability to reliably test and track within their own communities), you lost what little sympathy I could muster. For all intents and purposes, he owns all of the deaths from the day he stepped into the Oval Office. Worst of all, it's both set the tone for how future leaders will be able to respond to crises, as well as reinforced the notion that our government is ontologically incapable of providing anything for its own citizens besides more terror.
As for which one of these shitstains is more apathetic: Trump gave me more cash (and it wasn't means-tested), suspended my student loan payments, afforded me a rent moratorium if I had lost my job, and didn't end federal mask or testing mandates for traveling because his buddy at Delta Airlines whined to him in a letter. Nothing spells "apathy" like going on 60 Minutes amid yet another surge in cases and saying "the pandemic is over," or cutting off extended UI prematurely, or instructing cities to use their unused Covid funds to give to the pigs.
If Trump was smart enough to even utter the words "wear a mask" at any point in 2020 he would still be in office today. This is not an endorsement, for the record. I don't doubt Trump would have done all of this and worse eventually as well, but the difference is that his callousness was consistently met with resistance and vocal opposition. For Joe Biden, whose callousness is every bit as harmful, there is no effective resistance, no organized campaign to combat the president's anti-science blathering. We all have to get over it and live even more precariously in this shithole lest we be accused of helping Trump win again.
Gaslighting is telling people that Covid isn’t a threat even though you know it’s not and you deliberately cooked the books to sell that delusion. Gaslighting is telling people you’re supposed to be responsible for governing that a vaccine that was never shown to stop the spread of a disease does, in fact, do that. Gaslighting is telling people that you must personally assess your own risk to a collective, public health crisis with the paltry tools that have been provided, then strip away or sabotage every last one of those tools so they cannot provide even a sliver of usefulness to anyone but the most bad faith interpretations.
All of these things are things both Amerikkka’s fascist wing and liberal, fascist-enabling wing have done and are currently doing (if they’re not outright ignoring it). To anyone with a pulse, there is no meaningful difference, and indeed they are so often intertwined.
Also, Marx was based.
I'm going to keep going lol
Meddled in the rail unions' contract negotiations, then he and his party broke their strike after his corporate-friendly PEB's agreement was rejected by the unions. And no, the crumbs that were thrown at the rank-and-file after the fact does not make up for it, no matter how many flowery press releases from union leadership get pushed out there.
Opposes universal healthcare, doesn't even want a public option (but sure as hell campaigned like he did!). Likely not going to hear a peep about healthcare in the lead up to 2024, and this is with an ongoing pandemic that's already taken the lives of over two million people and disabled tens of millions more.
Wants more cops and more funding for cops after sucking all of the oxygen out of the Black Lives Matter movement and neutering all of their demands. Favors more surveillance and more privacy invasion.
Doubled down on Trump's immigration policies, sanctions on Cuba, and saber rattling over China, blew up Nordstream, bombed Syria (really, Biden's entire foreign policy has been and is astoundingly inhumane and terrifying, even for a US ghoul).
Continued to retain or has re-hired plenty of Trump (and Obama…and Bush) appointees who have demonstrably awful track records.
Weak-to-no leadership even within his own caucus that has resulted in failures to raise wages, build infrastructure, strengthen regulatory powers, or combat an openly corrupt Supreme Court (plus, he's rewarded the so-called obstructionists: Manchin and his family get pipelines and favors and special perks, Sinema gets to sit at the BBB negotiating table); that ended up doubling childhood poverty after spending a year touting its reduction by only half for some reason; that led to countless unnecessary deaths from nixing all sorts of programs and protections from a pandemic he pretends doesn't exist even harder and even more callously than his predecessor.
Above all, is simply Reagan in a blue tie, who is to the right of Reagan on several issues, more senile, and ultimately serves the entrenched power of capital and bourgeois interests that are destroying the planet. On its face, that should be enough for a leftist to hate his guts, but I also think he's a racist piece of shit, a sex pest, anti-labor, a serial liar, and an all-around slimeball and shitheel, and I base this on his entire miserable life as a politician, which has seemingly been memory-holed ever since Super Tuesday.
None of the above is "harm reduction," and the diminishing returns of using the specter of a Republican doing worse only reinforces my belief that the Democrats are aware that there isn't any effective distance between the parties other than aesthetics and won't do a thing to change that perception, seeing as we get Republican policies regardless of who's in office.
@RustyVenture
@hexbear.net