Not sure I agree. I think many people who are “defeatist about voting” have observed that the surface-level differences between Democrats and Republicans (namely social issues and the more visible fascism from Republicans) just mask an underlying corporatist/fascist state that’s sacrosanct and immune from popular pressure and legislative change.

Re: “Obamacare” (which is just one tiny change mind you) - there were some marginal improvements like re: preexisting conditions, but mostly it seemed to increase compliance costs, my understanding is premiums have just continued rising and the fundamental issues causing healthcare scarcity and limiting competition have been made worse.

In effect, the bonds I mentioned are just inverted loans. The Treasury takes in $1k from payroll taxes for these programs, issues a bond to the trust fund saying “I owe you $1k plus interest”, spends the $1k on whatever (I guess primarily the discretionary budget) and eventually has to somehow generate money to pay it back with interest.

In terms of whether or not bonds were “borrowed” - this wouldn’t exactly matter in a meaningful sense, but I’m not clear this ever actually happened in the first place. There was some claim about, when the trust fund was mixed with the general fund 1968-1990, maybe the government took bonds out of the program, but you have to remember that inside the government, that’s not something of value, that’s just an obligation the government has to pay to itself, it’s a big nothing burger. The outstanding liabilities from Social Security to the actual beneficiaries (elderly people) exist regardless of how the government is doing their accounting internally.

Read any SS Trustees report. It doesn’t have “money”, it has debt instruments (bonds), which are essentially a document saying “we the government owe ourselves a thousand dollars”. You can print those all day, it’s only sourcing that money that has any kind of direct consequence (taxation, inflation, etc.).

And yes, that does raise an interesting question of, what did they do with the actual money we paid into the programs, if the only thing in the trust fund is bonds.

Social Security doesn’t have assets, it has debt obligations, which to the government, are something you can conjure out of thin air. The only senses in which it can “run out” is if outlays exceed receipts, or if it runs out of debt instruments to cash out and has to ask for a pile of more debt instruments.

That’s not the question.

It’s interesting how this leaves out 17 years of choking supplies of food and water to the civilian population of Gaza, the Israeli occupation and settlements in Gaza prior to 2005, the fact that that illegal occupation had been ongoing for 38 years despite international outcry, the naval blockade amounting to an act of war of its own, and really the whole broader context of the population of Gaza being displaced by ethnic cleansing by Israel since 1948.

We need a hell of a lot more evidence to support that than we’ve seen, it would still run into major problems with proportionality/distinction standards regarding all the civilians they killed in and around the hospital, and it wouldn’t make a scratch with regard to the other civilian infrastructure they’ve targeted.

The way you phrase it poses an impossible dilemma for Palestinian resistance. Non-violent resistance is outlawed and slaughtered (anti-BDS law, massacre of the Great March of Return, assassinations of peace activists, international smear campaigns, etc.). Violent resistance is impossible on equal standards as Israel maintains air superiority over occupied Palestine - separate infrastructure would be bombed. So we have a ghettoized population, under siege, under blockade, under air monitoring. What option is left for them? Hidden military infrastructure, tunnels, arms smuggling - and this all gets immediately condemned.

We try to hold these populations to the standards of international law - but morally, the abstraction starts to break down. It’s easy for a country like the U.S. to abide by some of these standards on the surface - we can have exposed military infrastructure, because we have SAM sites, we have intercontinental ballistic missiles, first-class fighter jets, etc. We’ve heard plenty about the perspectives that purport to justify the Israeli/U.S. offensive, that seem on the surface to make our military efforts legitimate. But (from the media at least) we rarely hear about the narratives in support of the opposing side - 75 years of ethnic cleansing, land theft, crushing military occupation, siege, perfidy, random massacres and apartheid. They have a legitimate cause and grievances. So we have to actually consider what avenues of recourse are even available to them to pursue that cause. Otherwise we’re essentially just telling them to “quiet down and die”. On the broader scale, it’s like saying, it’s forbidden to punch while you’re lying on the ground, while you tackle somebody and beat them to death.

That being said, of course certain things are both war crimes and not essential to resistance - i.e., killing unarmed civilians - to whatever extent Hamas militants actually did engage in this (we know they killed some, and we know the IDF killed some as well - as well as the 13-20k+ civilians Israel has killed at this point).

And this is not to give credence to Israeli claims of repurposing, either. The standard under international law is to prove that each individual peace of infrastructure is actively being used for military purposes, and that its strategic value outweighs the casualties from shelling it, and Israel has not been meeting that standard overall by any metric.

You used to support (Palestine) but then the (entire 5M current population of Palestinian) paraded innocent cadavers through their streets?

Sorry for the brief comment before, was on my phone. Was talking about the users on lemmygrad.ml.

What I mean is, I mean, be careful about lumping people under stereotypes. It does seem like a tankie instance but some of their stances seem perfectly reasonable. The frustrating thing about Marxist theory in general is that it provides this general framework for describing systems of imperial and economic oppression, but does such a shitty job understanding the corollaries between that and the functioning of “communist” states. A lot of people get drawn in to that kind of thinking observing U.S. imperialism and such. I wouldn’t generalize too angrily about them, vast majority of people have some kind of half-baked ideology or another and it’s always just degrees of how many mistakes they’re making across a given group.

Every one of them exactly like that huh?

Removed by mod

Not impressed.

Then don’t attack people based on bullshit reasoning and then launch into these back and forths about how they’re wrong for defending themselves.

Removed by mod

I am not “going out of my way to play the persecuted martyr”, I opened the Lemmy home page and “post trashing vegans” was post #3. I thought I left this shit behind when I left reddit, but now it’s here too.

Not using animal products is not exhausting. I’ve done it for a decade and it’s a remarkably easy change where 99% of the difficulty comes from the wider society being hostile to it.

It is an ethical position based on an actual reality of animal agriculture causing vast suffering that we have chosen to opt out of supporting. It is absolutely reasonable and selfless to advocate for the rights of others at a minor, negligible personal sacrifice. It is not a sign of a need to shame others, a need to be a martyr, or any other personality defect that you’re going to project on vegans based on a stereotype despite knowing NOTHING about any of us as individuals. Nobody is trying to make you “feel ashamed”, we are pointing out objective facts about how the animal ag industry causes harm to animals, and then people like you, like you’re doing in this comment, right here, launch into this whole frigging diatribe about how vegans are shaming you and judging you and have a god complex and should just shut up and go back into their corners, because god forbid anyone should ever suggest that anything you’re doing is less than perfectly ethical.

It’s bullshit. I don’t know what else to tell you. I’ve been living with this for years and it’s absolute bullshit. Your position is wrong, it’s not a statement about you as a person, it’s a statement you should change your behavior. We are NOT at fault for showing the truth of the matter, that’s just a reactionary and ignorant position that people use to try to rationalize what’s convenient for them.

Removed by mod

In absolutely no way is that “preaching”.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod