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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Politics
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yeah, you completely misunderstood what I'm saying.
this is a framing of the problem that I often see from apologists of people like Biden - that his critics want him to "do more".
as if politics can be simplified down to a big dial with "do nothing" on one end, and "do lots of stuff" on the other, and critics simply want the dial turned higher.
in this oversimplification, if you can paint criticism of Biden as "he should have done more" then that criticism can be refuted with "no, look at all the things he did". which is what you're trying to do here. I say Biden has no principles, and you try to refute that with "no, look at this bill that he signed".
what I'm actually complaining about is Biden and other Democrats doing the wrong thing.
Biden approved a bunch of oil drilling. I would have preferred him to do less. less would have been an improvement. less would have been consistent with the Democrats' supposed principled opposition to climate change.
Biden approved (and expanded) a bunch of weapons shipments to Israel. again, I wanted him to do less.
the "do more" vs. "do less" framing of politics is so simplistic that it would get you a bad grade in a high school civics class. the actual question is, when Democrats do something, what are they doing and why are they doing it. is the thing they are doing good or bad.
You said the Democrats have no principles, in terms of how they campaign. I said, more or less, that that's true. But also, in terms of Biden specifically, he actually does seem to have a lot of principles in terms of what he did in office. With Gaza as one glaring and war-criminal exception.
I have no idea where you got this idea that I look at "more stuff" and "less stuff" as the two options or why you talked down to me so extensively about the idea that that's how I look at it. Clearly, hopefully, we both want more good stuff and less bad stuff, and it's just a matter of talking about what stuff was good and what stuff was bad.
I think it's interesting but maybe not surprising that you totally ignored my pretty detailed arguments about income and climate policy, and just kept talking to me as if I hadn't made them. Feel free to read them, they're pretty interesting, whether or not you feel like addressing them on any level with me specifically.