My stance in one sentence is:
If we lose because we did the right thing for people right now, GOOD.
The problem is we didn’t do the right thing so it’s no longer a consideration in this conversation.
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Brother…
I’m with Nunnehi 
on this, the main reason I am is that the 3 month delay just might mean there’s no tomorrow.
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This is the same sort of thinking that the Branch Covidians use to justify opposition to masks and support of opening up. We don’t know for sure that people will die. Maybe it will fade away, they say. Maybe there will be a vaccine soon, they say. What we know now is that people don’t have jobs and if we don’t open up they will starve and be evicted and probably end up dead. The people who want to lock everything down are actuaries who don’t care about the short-term costs to human life.
I embrace the idea of being analytical, of being data-driven, of being math-oriented. I take pride in being immune to anecdote-driven, emotional appeals like “what about the children” because being soft costs lives in the long-run. Quit being soft.
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I generally stay of this discussion but operate on the principle that if riggage isn’t defeated in 2020 it will be near impossible to beat in 2024. RBG ain’t lasting another 4 years.
The threat NOW is existential. Biden must win or we are fucked.
Any idea that the masses will rise up from the left has no evidence.
This isn’t politics. It isn’t philosophical. But it is what will happen with 4 more years of Trump.
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I mainly don’t think we’ll lose getting money to people who need it. The opponents in this thread think not getting money to people who need it will cause us to win. They also think if we get money to people who need it that we’ll lose.
This logic might work if 2018 as an election data point didn’t exist. What we’re going through now is much more immediate than the threat to health care was then. In this election, we should have had no shot at the Senate. We will probably win it because they are so awful, incompetent, and cruel.
The boomers legacy lives on.
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Haha thanks, I was quite proud of that poker analogy.
We’re not counting beans, we’re counting human lives and/or human suffering and trying to protect as many of them as possible.
You’re probably right that people being directly affected now would mostly disagree with me, and probably want to punch me in the face for being such a heartless asshole in their view. However, they’d be reacting based on a short-term view and desperation, and would not even consider the possibility that my approach was actually saving them more suffering long-term than it was costing them short-term. My goal is not to minimize immediate suffering, it’s to minimize overall suffering. My goal is not to make the people currently suffering as happy as possible now, it’s to make them suffer the least. My goal is not to do what they would want now, it’s to do what they would look back on in five years and see was the best path for them.
The long term political impacts = the long term amount of suffering. We aren’t guessing it will save more lives/suffering, we’re highly confident in that.
The EV of saving suffering/lives IS the moralistic side of it.
This is not at all what people are advocating, and if Trump wins we’re going to live in a dictatorship, not a flimsy democracy. Trump will serve 3+ terms if he wants to, he’ll be followed by either Don Jr or Ivanka, who will be followed by the other of the two, etc… Any illusion of elections from that point on will be just that, an illusion. There will be no chance of Bernie or AOC winning the presidency.
The dictatorship will not end peacefully. So when you say you legitimately don’t care if Biden loses, that’s what Biden losing really means.
You continue to raise the bar for dumbest comments on this forum. If we lose, GOOD? If we get the 2.5 months aid and lose and no additional aid ever comes, GOOD? How stupid is that?
If we fall into a dictatorship, GOOD? If Trump is president for 12 or 16 years and hands it off to Don Jr or Ivanka, GOOD?
If the 3 month delay means there’s no tomorrow, there was never a 3 months and a day from now anyway.
Neither is an absolute, but the odds absolutely move significantly in those directions. The president is going to get the credit for anything done, mainly because he’s going to sign the checks or send out letters and parade all over Twitter and TV bragging about it and the Dems suck at messaging. He’s going to get the blame if nothing happens because for most people the buck stops there, and he’s already claimed to have fixed it all by himself.
As a result, we should only let him off that hook for enough help to actually protect people through January. Anything less just takes a huge risk of even more suffering. As you keep pointing out, we’re not dealing with good faith actors. We’re dealing with monsters. However you keep acting like that whole part goes out the window as soon as a 2.5 month extension is signed. They’re still going to be the same monsters after that, only then they’ll have no selfish motivation to get anything done. So whatever we get now, we get. We better either get enough to last or make sure we win so we can give enough to get through the rest of it.
I’m also already on the record that Democrats should be using campaign funds and/or trying to fundraise for charities to help people in the next few months. Last but not least, if they sweep in November, there are actually things they can do in Nov/Dec to significantly ease the suffering, and I hope they’re smart enough to realize that and already be working on it.
That’s what we were discussing, better go read it!
Just kidding. Your guess is as good as mine. I’m guessing no, but it’s 2020, anything could happen.
No
No
You should wonder why this is.
Have you ever been so poor that you could not afford to eat? That you did not know where your next meal would come from? That you couldn’t depend on your parents or anyone else to bail you out of any problems that came up for you? If not, you cannot relate to this situation. Now tell that same person, ‘well, if you just do my plan you might get something really good or you might get nothing, but you could have gotten something that would have allowed you to eat for the next three months while everyone is figuring things out. The good won’t come for a few months, but surely you’ll be okay in the meantime, right?’
This is why you look in this thread like what you perceive a person at the end of their rope might think of you. I have news for you. This isn’t 20 people on the street, this could be millions of people facing this in the next several weeks. How you’ve acted in this thread is just plain gross, but you are very bad at introspection when challenged to look at it from a perspective you truly do NOT understand.
By doing this you very well could be maximizing suffering. Step back and think about why. Maybe you’ll start to realize why we’re so opposed here. You’re using a different calculus that works out very similarly to how a lot of the GOP thinks.
No
Maybe you don’t intend to post in such consistent bad faith, but you do all the time. You consistently take someone’s position, re-frame it, say it’s theirs, and then continue saying your misrepresented position of the person’s position is their position. I’m telling you, you would be in high demand in the Republican Party for how much you distort what people say.
I’m saying that you shouldn’t live in fear of doing the right thing because often when people do the right thing a whole lot of people respond well to doing the right thing. Just two short years ago, if you were a lawyer who wore a tiny pin that said BLM on it in a courtroom you could be kicked out or forced to take it off. You could be run out of a pro sports league for expressing that sentiment. Today, Black Lives Matter is not even remotely considered fringe because it is doing the right thing. You’re telling people to sit back and wait until the time is right when there may never be a right time. Most people do not want to wait any longer and in the situation we’re talking about most of them cannot wait at all.
Your responses in this thread are quite the contrast to your living situation in the other thread. But continue doubling and tripling down on heartlessness because you just KNOW what’s going to happen.
No. This is your worldview determining the outcome based on your worldview and does not line up with the reality of the actual situation on the ground. Again, this is your Ivory Tower thinking shining through. I’m done with you seriously.
Every time someone picks on your point of view you say, ‘I do this. I do that. I’m doing the right things.’ I’ve avoided saying it as long as I can, but what you keep doing is sounding like a virtue signaler. You may not be a virtue signaler, but man oh man do you constantly act like one and then defend it by doing just that. Like it or not, man, you ARE Nancy Pelosi while thinking you’re the opposite.
Please explain to me how you’re willing to sacrifice let’s just say, 5 million people for something that might not happen. How about 20 million? 40 million? This kind of thing sounds a lot like Trump saying, ‘millions could have died if I hadn’t done what I did’, when right now we probably shouldn’t be above 20,000. This is that same thinking except we may end up with no mitigation if the GOP wins because we did nothing.
You sound like people complaining that Democrats want to sacrifice the economy to save people who might not die.
I’m not. The Republicans are offering to hold the football for you again Charlie Brown and you’re pretending like this is the time they’re gonna let you kick it.
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No, that’s not what’s happening. Nancy decided the absolute best way to counter the incessant bad faith of the GOP is to also negotiate in bad faith at the most crucial point in our lifetimes. Neither side has real interest in any kind of compromise deal because each thinks that will help the other side in an election year. I’ve said this at least a half dozen times in this thread, but this is exactly why no serious legislation is ever tackled in an election year. If you’re looking for a true leverage point, it was the CR. Nancy never thought the GOP wouldn’t do anything leading up to that, because she clearly never had any evidence that they don’t care how many people die right now. Now she has to put in all the marbles and hope it works out.
Because of polling being relatively meaningless, neither side knows which one is right and the impacts are still 4-6 weeks before they begin being dramatically felt for those it hasn’t already affected (first really horrible effects will begin a few days after Sep. 1). Again, just so that no one thinks I’m saying this about people in this thread, I’m talking about Congresscritters.
I want the EV peeps to own that they’re cool with unnecessarily sacrificing lives. Don’t tell me you’re doing it to save them. That doesn’t work for me. It’s for others to determine what they’re willing to live with. I know what I’m willing to live with and it ain’t what’s being discussed here. Hate on that all you want, I really don’t care. I’m quite convinced doing nothing is much more dangerous to our electoral prospects than doing something.
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This line reminds me of when Republicans argue that Democrats don’t want to open up the economy because they think it will help Biden win. And that it should be up to people to determine how much risk they are willing to live with.
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I agree. Accepting that Republican proposal would be insane. The house passed a Bill in May. The republicans haven’t negotiated in good faith for one second.
What you don’t ever do is accept some quarter arsed proposal now.
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Dude, it’s a real life trolley problem here. Either kill X number of people now, or kill them and 10X more people later. There is no scenario where we save X now then save them again in November. Those of us in the most precarious position are fucked no matter what. @anon38180840 is 100% right about how to maybe not fuck the rest of us.
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They created a trolley problem where it didn’t exist as a trolley problem did not exist before the second week of August ended. Now the trolley problem that’s being set up is that absolutely everyone who is not significantly well off is going to be run over even if we win the election (if we lose, it’s going to be a lot worse than that). But hey at least some ‘rich’ people are going to get run over too (landlords), so there’s that.
Again, this entire debate started before there was a trolley problem. That means where we are today was unnecessary. We are now unnecessarily sacrificing lives for politics, just like we were sacrificing lives to save the f’ing Dow Jones. That’s where I have the difference from the rest of you who are on Cuse’s side. Cuse (Nancy) called the trolley to try to ‘back’ Mitch and the GOP into a corner. Mitch and the GOP are saying, ‘can you speed the trolley up please?’
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You’ve got the analogy backwards. You’re doing the equivalent of trying to save the Dow Jones in the short term while Cuse is on the side of trying to save more lives over the long term.
For the last time, my position doesn’t only save lives in the short term, it very easily could save lots of lives in the long term, far more than Cuse, because of all the people he’s killing in the interim. You are basing all of this on tired assumptions that you do not know the outcome of for sure. The problem is it is now for sure too late and the outcome people on your side have pulled us into is the worst one. There’s a little bit more time to do something, but after a few weeks it will be January or nothing. In that scenario, it’s much much much more likely to be nothing but for some reason those on your side refuse to see that as reality.
The fact that you’re so willingly in agreement with this side should tell anyone on it where it resides in the moral continuum. There’s a lot of data on the things you’d like to happen that you’ve posted on this site.
The one thing I like about you is at least you own this stuff. Cuse claims he’s doing it for humanity when he really isn’t. I wanted him to own that, but he refuses to, so that’s the closing of that book.