US oil production hits all-time high
Executive action ordering the closure of border cutting asylum claims in half (according to FOX News)
Aren’t these generally seen as bad things, though?
I’ll also say a lot of this list is basically just routine infrastructure maintenance funding, which was arguably necessary, but I would much rather see a combating of the more institutional problems that led to this infrastructure being in such a state of disrepair in the first place. Expanding a highway, for example, not really something I would say is a great accomplishment. The economic citations are things that I find kind of suspicious more generally, because I’m familiar with the amount of laundering economists can accomplish when they really put their pussy into it. Post-pandemic recovery, for example, I can think of a couple ways to spin that, most of them involve us having taken a very large hit from the pandemic compared to other countries because we had a shit ass pandemic response relative to other countries. Violent crime dropping from 2020 is gonna be a fuckin no brainer, for example, like obviously that’s gonna be the case, I don’t think you can really attribute that to a biden presidency.
Eliminate the padding in this list and back up what appear to be the stronger points and it would be more serious. As it stands, this is more just kind of a gish gallop. You’re just popping a bigass list with no citations and then that’s gonna look more credible while your opposition can’t do much in the face of it without looking like they’re nitpicking or denying reality, even though you don’t have any citations. It might be cynical, but I’ve been on the internet before, so I bet if I push back at all, you’re just gonna tell me to look into it further myself, and that it’s not your job to educate me even though you’re the one who has the burden of proof for making these claims, like how tankies tell me to read theory whenever I ask them questions about books they’ve supposedly read biblically and know so well.
In any case, a lot of these aren’t really fighting against the idea that the democrats just end up as a controlled opposition band-aid which barely does anything before fascism creeps back in and fucks something else up in our shitty pendulum system. It’s not really fighting against that claim, which I would say is the core nihilistic, apathetic claim that has to be disputed before people can be convinced that their vote will do something.
So, people can make the whole like, oh, this is a different context, kyle is joking, whatever whatever, right, and that’s both true and a fine argument to make. But I also think when we make this like, freedom as a principle argument, right, free speech as a principle, argument, it isn’t necessarily hypocritical.
We’re just not prioritizing freedom, prioritizing free speech, as the highest possible value that trumps all other values. I think kind of by necessity, it can’t be. The idea of free speech is logically incoherent if you take it to the extreme, because you could just define speech as being anything. Harmful acts, smearing poop on the bathroom walls, whatever. So you have to put a limit on it, and then those external values are going to be what places the limit on it.
Those external values of “I agree with kyle gass” vs “I agree with dave chapelle”. Agreeing with either argument, beyond that, thinking either argument, had in the public sphere, is worthwhile, that’s what has to define the limits of speech and freedom and what has to drive the outlook on it. I might oppose the poop swastika in the rec center bathroom, but I might think the ACAB poop smear in the nazi bar bathroom is maybe okay, even if it’s a little misguided or kind of just stupid or whatever.
There has to be a core value there. It’s not necessarily hypocritical to believe that political violence can be called for, or justified against your foes necessarily, and then think that the same thing shouldn’t be done to you on the nature of your ideology strictly being better. If my foes are basically just evil, straight up, yeah, probably at the very least stop them from like, having undue economic influence, which depending on who you ask, is gonna be some form of economic violence by nature of stripping away their agency or property or whatever. That doesn’t necessarily strike me as hypocritical, or not believing in equal rights or anything, it just strikes me as pragmatic.