And the only way election reform happens is if we get the corporate Dems who like things the way they are (AKA roughly all of them) out of power. It’s damn near hopeless.

How have I never made this connection? That’s gonna be my facepalm of the year I think…it’s so very obviously the exact same behavior.

🤡

No disagreement there, sounds like we essentially agree and just needed to take a few minutes to argue with one another, lol. Cheers and have a good one!

We’re just talking in circles my friend. My original and only point is that focusing on compassion for him when discussing the problem is misguided at best. At worst, it’s exactly the thing you’re describing - making the conversation entirely unproductive, and avoiding the serious problem, getting focused on this very typical moralizing we on the left do.

Fuck John Fetterman, and fuck any person who demands compassion for him be prioritized in the conversation. If we disagree, we disagree, I don’t think I can make my point any more clearly. I regard anyone demanding the wrong things be discussed as - intentionally or not - helping the fascists. This is not a poorly thought out point of view, it’s not a shallowly held conviction, and I’m just about finished even discussing it.

I don’t care. You are completely missing the point. Everything you said is obviously, like painfully obviously, true in a general sense. It’s Morality 101.

Do you see the state of this place?? Are you aware that Fetterman has been causing these kinds of problems for a LONG time now, and do you agree that we desperately need every fucking scrap of pull to bring this country and it’s people back from the brink?

Giving a shit about the man’s well-being is someone else’s goddamn job. Miss me with your pearl clutching bullshit.

That was a reference to Biden, and the fact that it should not come to this, and when it does, compassion for the patient is obviously the wrong thing to prioritize.

Edit: clarity

I just don’t agree. It’s more like being upset at an Alzheimer’s patient for totally blowing an important debate.

So be it. It’s been a LONG time in this state. That sucks for him. The outsized damage he’s able to do makes me unsympathetic. He’s just one guy. Boo fucking hoo. The extraordinary damage happening to countless lives in this fucking country today, and we need to have a chat about how much compassion to give this guy? Again, get real!

Edit: I guess your point is about his own inability to see the problem, which I acknowledge. I don’t think he’s due any outsized compassion, at all.

Sounds like everyone else is weirdly angry that he’s STILL IN OFFICE causing problems when he’s clearly not fit for the job, regardless of the reason? Isn’t that the more pressing concern than his health, him being an utter stranger to almost everyone?

Why do people need to be kind and sensitive toward someone’s recovery while that person insists on keeping a position of extreme responsibility, and constantly fucks it up, while “recovering”?

Crappy take, friend. And the “so much for tolerance” is such a loaded phrase, you almost sound insincere, to boot. We don’t owe these politicians a fuckin thing, CERTAINLY not some prioritized level of compassion. Get real!

What are you talking about lol. Jeff Bezos is doing the only thing Jeff Bezos does, stuff that’s good for Jeff Bezos. This is giant leverage that tells the Trump administration “we have big tools at our disposal if you don’t make us happy with whatever economic policies we do end up with”. He displayed that leverage, it turned into a news story, and behind closed doors, a shift occurred, likely minor, in the ever-evolving power dynamic between the two pricks.

Don’t get it twisted. These dudes and the rest like them will never help us except in the most casually incidental way.

Thanks, Ken. DOLT

The elephant in the room is the huge violence required to bring any “simple fix” to fruition. The fascists are doing some of the violence for their own simple fixes, now, openly. They of course intend the further violence, too.

Some of us see the elephant. Most of us (almost all of us, myself included!) are just tryna get from one day to the next. That’s bad, elephant gets bigger…

To reply more in the spirit of my original comment, since I spent a lot of words (probably many more than you wanted to read lol) on your COL angle -

(and actually, I realized after I got a little ways into this, I’m just clarifying my thoughts for my own benefit at this point lol, this is basically me just saying things. I’ma post it, it’s Lemmy, why not)

The idea about “versions of life we go through, thinking they’re normal” -

That’s important to me. Going totally unreasonable here - I really believe that most people, regardless of background - if you actually exposed them to the true suffering of the very poor, and the true excess of the very rich, most people would understand that none of this is really acceptable, it only seems that way, it’s actually deeply wrong. I think most people, if they could really get even just a weeklong glimpse of life in those shoes (both extremes, and one in the middle), nearly every single one - rich, poor, or in the middle - would clamor for abrupt change. I think we can care, we just don’t see.

The opposite of the above, lacking it, is the “…thinking it’s normal” I meant.

One enormous, but strange, barrier to all of us recognizing that truth is just the simple fact of the way our lives work - through none of our doing, we wind up ensconced in the environment in which we grew up, roughly, from a socioeconomic standpoint. We live our lives in that “lane”, that “version”, and we die in the way the people in our “versions” die, too. This applies across $0 - $Inf.

The barrier I’m describing as strange is that way because it’s often very invisible, and - rich or poor - sudden realizations about one’s lived “version”, and the versions of others - those are jarring, damaging, to whomever experiences them.

We should probably do more of it, though. The jarring forced realizations. Like, a lot more. Luigi Mangione, for instance, I think that dude really understood, and the thing is - most people also understood, they thought what he did was dope. I really wish we’d all focus more on what happened there. Do more of it, even.

I’ll agree with you, I don’t think I’ve made my point all that well. That most recent comment you’re replying to here was rushed and did a poor job, that’s my bad!

I didn’t really want to make it about COL at all, and I’ve asked myself why, and I think I take issue with the way it papers over deeper problems sometimes (but to be fair, the opposite thing where people don’t understand COL differences is super frustrating).

I have several issues with it, it turns out, and you may end up rejecting them all, but I did a shit job earlier and you asked what I meant, so here goes. Gonna be long lol, sorry. But yeah, complaining about wealth disparity, not COL, but also COL doesn’t invalidate my complaints, IMO.

1. It’s my understanding that folks on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder do fare worse, the higher the COL. So while things scale (that’s the idea after all), I don’t think pay scales evenly across compensation ranges. I have to acknowledge that I have no source on this and I may have a shaky basis for that belief. I should probably improve my rigor there. It does look like homelessness is higher, per capita, in larger cities, which seems like at least a very rough proxy for my assertion. So that’s one problem for me, COL doesn’t erase that magnitude or make it more in reach necessarily, for the chronically broke.

2. Not all goods and services are priced locally. People making high COL wages have inherent advantages over people making low COL wages when paying for anything that isn’t priced locally.

3. That issue really extends far when you apply it abroad to things like aid that could be given to people for whom even a single dollar a day can be a tangible improvement. I’m placing this separately because we all value the well being of one another differently by proximity, unfortunately, so some folks may accept #2 as a problem and not see #3 as their concern. I do personally try to give what I can charitably, split between local food banks and sort of “maximizing impact wherever”.

At any rate, folks who feel badly disadvantaged due to these do fit into what I meant by the “versions of life” phrasing, but I mostly intended just the chronically broke there. You can be broke enough, basically anywhere in the US, such that roughly everyone you know never uses professional paid childcare, priced moderately or otherwise. So COL only goes but so far for that reason too.

But to be clear, I was thinking of wasteful rich people. We both made an assumption about what kind of people/situation the original content referred to, neither is really more valid than the other. I absolutely understand that COL has big impacts and is sometimes left out. But there’s a lot of nuance to COL, and I don’t really feel I need to make a disclaimer about it to make statements like I did. It’s fine if you disagree.

Edit: minor phrasing

Alright. I don’t really know how to have conversations if we have to couch things in COL gradients. I was specifically responding to this person’s sense of astonishment, because it’s cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt. And it’s - in a mirror kind of way - dehumanizing and damaging for the actually rich (I don’t mean you), that they’re astonished when they learn the ugly thing, too.

And I mean everything I said, and I said the most important bits right at the top. We go through these versions of life and think they are normal. Your reply to me sounds a lot like you doing exactly that, I dunno what else to say my friend but I wish you well and cheers, sincerely.

People live in way different fuckin worlds man, and the weird part is a lot of us just go through life thinking our “version” is normal. The folks who do this and whose friends do this and whose parents did this - it’s normal to them.

I don’t think I’m conveying this well. There are whole communities, made up of individual people, for whom this is standard, expected, because it’s what they’ve always been surrounded by, grew up practically breathing it as normal. And for these folks, the reciprocal realization to the one you made, realization that MANY people do not (can not) do this - comes as a similar level of surprise.

It’s really fucked up. And it’s something deeper and harder to fix than just pointing to one guy or class of people as The Problem (to be clear, that guy and class of people I’m referencing ARE an enormous, hideous problem).

Grift. It’s all scam, all the time.

For real, what a braindead (at best) thing to say. His attempts to ethnically cleanse Palestine and build resorts on the coast, and his attempts to steal mineral wealth from Ukraine while under brutal attack by Russia, those attempts have faltered? Yeah, thankfully they have, I’m sure he’s still trying though.

I’m so tired of all the “reasonable language” used for this administration. It just amounts to flat out lying to avoid upsetting the very worst fucking people. Again - at best - that’s me being charitable, there are even worse motivations than that of course.