lutillian

"'The unborn' are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn."

~David Barnhart

The only reason pro choice exists is because the republican party found the perfect groups to advocate for and against. It makes their constituents feel all warm and fuzzy to say they're pro life, while they're given an equally convenient group to hate. Trans people make up just slightly less than one percent of the US population and the odds of one of their constituents will actually meet a trans person are significantly lower than them meeting that nice middle class gay/black Christian protestant couple who sometimes invites them over for supper after church on Sundays.

I'm not sure we can attribute this inaction to much more than the established Democrats actually stand to personally benefit from these policies. They don't really have a reason to push back because their donors are the same people in most cases (there are a few exceptions) and so many of them have the same level of gerrymandering and name recognition in their districts as the opposition.

This is not a statement that both parties are the same. They demonstratively are not as Democrats won't typically be the ones to enact these policies but they also don't really have a reason to stop them either since things like the tax breaks personally benefit them.

Red Hat 4, father say me down on one of his Frankenstein computers built out of his trash heap in our basement and told me to have fun. I found tux racing konquest and played the shit out of them

Same reason people are pissed at Biden for every handling of that 100% falls within the domain of another governmental branch. Currently the executive branch is sorta Atlasing our entire government which requires them to severely overreach their powers opening them up to checks and balances by the other highly sabotaged branches that both seemingly wish to force our entire government to accomplish nothing. The most publicized example of this is three student loan forgiveness package that Biden's administration tried to pass that got blocked, though there are lots of other examples.

The reality is that the executive branch as a whole has very little long term reach and we need to be pressuring Congress to do literally anything at all. The only time I'm going to look at Biden and say "this is his fault" is when I see Congress pass a bill doing something like sending an aid package to Gaza and/or Ukraine, only to have him refuse to sign. Which I suspect he'd actually just sign something like that through. We'll never know for sure because two of our federal branches are too busy playing something vaguely resembling a game of football where the ball is a 50 lb boulder and everyone's screaming that they keep subbing their toes on on it.

One of the biggest downsides of a VPN; you share an exit node with lots of other people, only takes one bad actor to get your exit node ip banned

I wish I had been born in Denmark or Norway - at least their social democratic safety nets would allow my community to thrive as the world burns around us

I feel this in my soul.

Yes. That's a question that has been raised by the US department of state that we might see an answer to in our life times of we're lucky.

I was mostly using unverified in lacking sources and people not going through and verifying their sources before just blindly believing them. Which seems to happen a lot.

People see Biden did something and don't look into why Biden did the thing he did then start calling him every because he did the thing he did without understanding why he did it. It's a vicious circular loop that I've seen with pretty much every president we've had since I can remember.

Biden seems to be pretty conscious about remaining within the bounds of law so there's a good chance there's generally some obscure treaty or other random grouping of legal documents that when all bundled together cause the reaction we see. I like to look up what those are because I find it interesting but I can guarantee the bulk of people in this thread do not.

We're not bound to sell weapons but we're bound to provide aid by a combination of Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement (1952) which I can't find the text of from my phone... Need to wait till I'm near a computer to try again and Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (1991) which I linked elsewhere in the thread.

https://www.dsca.mil/programs/excess-defense-articles-eda Does explicitly allow the sale of arms to a list of nations from my understanding. This is a huge rabbit hole of laws and then exceptions to laws.

whether I personally agree any of this is right is a different story here

The ways to remedy a bilateral defense agreement depending on the actual agreement (I'm having trouble finding any of the us-isreal ones... So I'm just making assumptions here) usually boil down to supplying military aid or providing military defense.

Essentially the us must deploy supplies or a defense force. I'll keep digging for the actual text of one of these treaties but it might take a bit because the US state departments site is actually just really badly organized.

Summary of our obligations from the state department https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-israel/

The two that apply here are that arms can be dispersed with only congressional notification and that we're have multiple bilateral defense agreements with them.

Hamas issued an attack on Israel which triggered the bilateral defense agreements and one way to remedy would be to deploy supplies to the region with congressional notification.

Just imagine the damage to the region if we took bilateral defense to it's logical conclusion and dispatched actual military aid.

This is not Biden "going around Congress". This is Congress explicitly granting permission in advance to do it as long as they are notified.

(Worth noting I've never looked this deeply into this before so I'm learning about this clown fiesta as well. It goes pretty deep...)

That's only a subsection of our obligations. Two paragraphs up are what I was actually talking about. We have multiple bilateral defense agreements with them which essentially boils down to an attack on me must me treated as an attack on you.