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How it feels
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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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The goverment paying off student loans is like bucketing water out of your boat and ignoring the hole. Like sure, its gonna keep some people afloat for a little longer but the issue hasn't really been addressed, the problem is still there and the cycle remains a perpetual shit storm. The cost of education is preposterous, the people taking these loans dont have jobs to support paying it back, and most of them are too young to have the experience informing them of what a monumental undertaking paying it back will be. If they tried to get the same loan for a house or business they would be denied. There are so many issues to tackle but paying off the loans rewards the groups who created the problem in the first place. It incentivizes them to continue the foul play and prey upon vulnerable youth. Without some systematic reform accompanying the loan payoffs to ensure this doesn't continue we will end up in the same situation over and over again.
While I fully agree the issue is the underlying problem... that is some All Lives Matter shit.
Because basically anyone who brings that up as an excuse to not wipe the slate clean are in that same "We need to think really hard about how we do this and not do anything for another 30 years". Same as most "Banning guns won't stop gun violence" people. It is a bad faith argument that boils down to insisting that the perfect MUST be the enemy of the good.
Im not saying we shouldn't pay off the loans or delay doing so. I'm saying that alone will not solve the problem. We must do both. I never hear discussion on that second part. Ignoring it is foolish.
And yes, the snails pace at which reform would occur is infuriating. It shouldn't take 30 years because some asshats will continue to argue in the nature of "how dare we hurt these businesses?!" while people continue to suffer. It sucks that it likely will, but if we dont start now it will never happen instead of eventually.
My brother is a big fan of law and governance, and he said that American society was set up so that laws move at a snail's pace.
The shit that the current turd in chief is doing by writing hundreds of executive orders to constantly shake things up and make people constantly have to keep adapting to changes until they don't know from one day to the next what the laws are going to be are what they originally attempted to prevent by making it so slow and arduous to change the laws.
Dampnut issuing executive orders like they're leftover wads of tissue on the toilet paper he has to wipe his gigantic, flabby ass with is destabilizing the country and also making it so that stupid people think that good laws can be made quickly.
The foul swine in a bad orange toupee is causing multiple levels of damage to the country, and one of the side effects of that is making it so that it feels like we can solve something like a $1 trillion student loan debt crisis by signing a couple of sheets of paper.
What a good law would be would be something more like making it so that the interest on student loans can no longer accrue interest, or reducing the interest on student loans to something reasonable, like 1% over the federal interest rates.
It could do things like allowing student loans to be discharged through bankruptcy, or by setting a maximum on how much can be paid off over the life of the loan before it is automatically forgiven, no matter how long that takes.
Right now, the issue with student loans are manifold.
Some of them are things like the interest accruing interest, which means that people can take out a loan for $60,000 or $70,000, pay back $120,000 over 15 years, and owe over $100,000 still on the student loans.
Some of the other issues are things like people taking out loans for careers that are interesting but that leave them bankrupt or like does not provide them income. I know somebody who went to a Mormon college in Utah and got her master's degree in fucking pottery and ceramics.
Her student loans were like $90,000 so that she can make pots at home because there are no fucking jobs in America for potters.
Five years of education, and after student loans, well in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, and what she's doing is the thing she was doing while she was going to college, which is working as a jewelry artist for a small jewelry firm, which is something she did not need the degree for, and that her degree does not apply to.
So there should be some limits or some hard rules on what colleges can charge based off of how well what you are learning gives you the ability to pay back the cost of the education.
I'm not smart enough to figure out what those are, but I am smart enough to say that it is a problem to charge someone six figures of their total lifetime income for something that they are passionate about, but that is ultimately incapable of paying back the original cost, and that also saps the happiness out of their life.
This one doesn't fit your argument. It might affect gun violence, but you're ignoring the fact that people have access to a ton of ways of killing others.
The main driver of violent crime is poverty and income inequality. The solution is to tax the rich, give everyone fair wages, provide universal healthcare, properly fund schools, etc. All things that are already part of the core liberals stance, and none of those involve introducing unpopular legislation that stomps all over constitutional rights.
But heaven forbid we talk about actually fixing the root causes of violent crime. No, some people just want to ban guns to own the conservatives, and get mad when anyone pokes holes in the plan.
Being pro-gun control is the liberal equivalent of being "pro-life".
Not really. You can have a huge range of levels of control and regulation on guns. You can't really have anything between life and not life.
2nd Amendment is pretty clear: shall not be infringed
Also pretty clear that it was specifically for a "well-armed and regulated militia"
Don't get me wrong, I own guns, I like guns, I believe that guns can be owned safely, and I also believe that there should be more controls on who owns guns and what kinds of guns they own under which circumstances.
I feel like hunting equipment and 22s and stuff like that, semi-automatic handguns, perfectly fine for home ownership, home defense, etc..
But sniper rifles and machine guns and rocket launchers and everything above that basic home gun ownership tier should be placed in a sort of library-type militia system where people can join that militia, be trained in its proper and effective use, and be like a volunteer reserve national guard-type thing.
Kind of like we have volunteer fire departments where tax payers and donations provide them with the tools, but they go through the training so that they can back up the actual paid fire department.
Of course, we should have a gun-owner license.
A licensing system where you have to attend a basic safety course, possibly register for some sort of gun-owner insurance to pay for possible injuries to other people through negligent gun ownership usage, things like that would massively increase the safety factor of guns and massively increase the number of people that are qualified to use a gun in case of emergency and have the training needed to do so effectively.
Further, it's not beyond the pale to make it that our weapons should be registered so that if they're used in committing a crime, the weapon itself can help identify the criminal that committed a crime with the weapon, even if they stole the weapon from you to commit the crime.
I'm all for gun ownership. I just want more responsibility, more accountability, and more maturity about it.
It's not really cool that any 18-year-old can pop down to a local Walmart and get enough ammunition to blow away a supermarket full of children.
Except that's not the case. Here is the full text:
If you go through writings from that era you'll notice that while the vocabulary changes (I'll get to that), the grammar is virtually identical to modern English.
If you reread the amendment with that in mind, you'll notice that the first clause doesn't actually say anything actionable. It's just an explanation. Isolating the second clause of "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" doesn't change the meaning of what's being said.
Now, why did the Framers decide to include an explanation into the 2nd Amendment, but not the others? That's hard to say. But I can at least expand on the context of the first clause.
Remembered how I said that vocabulary has changed? That's unfortunately what happened with the first clause a bit At the time, the term "regulated" actually referred to being trained and equipped.
The term "militia" has also been distorted over time in common vernacular. What most people commonly think of as a "militia" like the National Guard is more precisely called an "organized militia". In contrast, an "unorganized militia" refers to all able-bodied men of military age, at the time considered to be ages 16-45. Basically anyone that could be drafted in war.
This is important when you consider US military doctrine up until WWII. In times of peace, the US Army kept a small corp of professional officers, with the intent to draft men into the Army as needed whenever war is declared. Then once war was over, all the drafted men were sent back and the Army was shrunk back down.
This doctrine present a major logistics problem: when war breaks out, you need a lot of fighting men in a short amount of time. To alleviate this problem, you want the draftees (aka the unorganized militia) to already have much of the skills and equipment needed to fight, with one of these critical skills being marksmanship. Hence why the Framers found it necessary to national defense for the populous to be able to have their own weapons.
To change gears, there's another argument I want to make: gutting and/or removing one of the amendments in the Bill of Rights sets a dangerous precedent. While the 21st amendment exists to nullify the 18th, we've never done that to any of the original 10 amendments. If the 2nd is abolished, why why not abolish the 4th, or the 5th, or even the 1st? That's a dangerous precedent.
And while there's the stereotypical argument of "you can't take on jets and tanks with AR15's", the US lost Vietnam and Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq too. And that's with the coffers and supply lines protected by an entire ocean. While a civil war would be horrifying, having that proverbial nuclear button pressures the government into somewhat caring what the populous thinks.
Unfortunately, with the particular "administration" in charge at the moment I wouldn't feel comfortable with them having a list of who has weapons. That'd make it easier for them to go after potential armed resistance early, allowing them to go full authoritarian.
Honestly, it's in our best bet to stop pushing for gun control. That'd get rid of one of the big reasons that more moderate conservatives don't vote for Democrats. Especially since we could instead put that effort into education, healthcare, labor rights, etc. which would do a much better job of reducing violent crime while making everyone's lives better. There's only so much political capital that a candidate and party can have, and it's best spent where it would do the most good.
I'm not in favor of abolishing any rights accorded to the people by the Constitution.
If anything, I feel like we should have more rights and that the government itself should have fewer rights.
That being said, I also believe that we should open the doors and allow more people to have guns, but we should also attach educational requirements, location requirements, insurance requirements, and third-party checks on who has what gun when because, as you know the unbelievable spate of school shootings has shown, irresponsible gun ownership is one of the primary causes of death in what should be the richest and safest country in the world.
Implementing these checks would not infringe upon the rights of gun owners, it would expand them, it would allow bump stocks, silencers, fully automatic machine guns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, grenades themselves, landmines, tanks, surface-to-air missiles...
I literally could not give the first fuck over who has what weaponry as long as there is a reasonable, sane, and balanced check on how that weaponry can be used, and who has oversight on it.
The bigger issue is that we have irresponsible gun ownership and because of one clause in the Bill of Rights and how it is interpreted, these continued escalations of murders and travesties are happening so often that a school shooting is barely even front page news at this point.
That is incredibly terrifying, and sad.
We should do something about it because we are a sane society, and one of the best things that we can do about it is to institute licensing, registration, insurance, education, and taking weaponry above the level of self-defense and placing them in places where people can responsibly monitor their access, where they can actually be used and enjoyed for what they are, but they are not casually lying around unguarded by negligent parents and made available to disgruntled teenagers.
This sounds like a privacy dystopia ripe for governmental abuse.
Or just teach this in schools to everyone. We already need to add home-economics back into public schools across the country. Include firearm safety alongside it. And when everyone takes the class, you don't have to track anyone.
Factually incorrect. Heart disease and cancer are the leading causes of death. And out of gun deaths, accidents are a minority. The largest cause of gun deaths are suicides, which are best fixed via improving living standards with the methods I've already stated.
Your comment is nothing but idealistic, flowery language that doesn't really say anything. It's the gun control equivalent of "save the mother and the child" that's being parroted by the pro-life crowd
I think the comic strip in the OP was already a sufficient example of a bad faith argument but thanks for adding another one, I guess?
Ah, yes, more snarky comments that don't actually address any points. Congrats on being a stereotypical pro-gun control pundit.
It's pretty clear that you aren't worth bothering with
At no point does the comment say your government shouldn't pay off loans. It sounds more like they want the perfect and the good.
The OP is a comic about people being opposed to student loans for the most stupid and selfish of reasons.
Screen Shatter proceeds to, at best, make a non sequitor about why student loan forgiveness is actually not a good thing. I then point out that while there are many arguments in favor of focusing on the root cause (that I agree should be the goal), people who bring that up in response to "should we forgive student loans" are almost always arguing in bad faith.
Think less in terms of reading completely unrelated twitter posts and more about an actual conversation and why someone would say X in response to Y. Because Context. It's a B.
In conversations I find it's best to operate with a positive view of the person I'm talking to. Rather than assuming intent, I go with what they've said and hope for the best until I know otherwise.
You assumed Screen_Shatter disagreed with loan forgiveness, even though they didn't say that in their comment. Happily, the Screen_Shatter replied to you, and they agreed with it! It turns out you have something in common! Just because they have other ideas doesn't mean they disagree on this one.
Assuming Screen_Shatter disagreed was a mistake and it made the conversation less pleasant. Just like telling someone:
Lemmy is a small community. Assume the best about folks on here and help make it more welcoming. Hopefully it'll grow.
Yeah. I prefer to operate under the assumption that people are at least trying to have a conversation. Rather than just walking around spewing non sequitors. If someone feels they were misinterpreted, they can reply and clarify... rather than get angry that people interpreted what they wrote rather than what they were thinking. That is, again, how you have a conversation.
STRONG disagree. Lemmy is a small (for the modern internet) userbase. Not a community. A community is one where you regularly get to know others and... communicate. Lemmy, like basically all modern social media, is people shouting into a void. Hell, Lemmy is on the worse end of that since so many of us came from reddit where all that matters is looking for keywords and writing the right canned/meme response to get the most updoots.
Think about it this way: How often have you actually interacted with someone and thought "I want to get to know that person better" or even "Hey, it is so and so. I wonder how the event they were talking about went?". I personally have a few new internet friends from Mastodon funny enough. But Lemmy? We reddit up in here.
And... you know a great way to never make those connections? By assuming nobody is communicating or responding to anyone else and considering every comment to be made in a void.
I'll also refrain from pointing out the difference between clarifying intent and doubling down or how often chuds have used this very same "assume the best of everyone" to spread hate over the decades of the modern internet.
Way too many jobs require degrees to apply as well. Yeah, if you're a doctor, scientist, engineer, or other specialist that really does require advanced education, you need that level of education.
But I'm hiring a new permit tech to process contractor registrations, take permit payments, and answer the phone. It's ludicrous that the city wants them to have a degree in "Public Administration, Fiance, Construction Science, or a related field."
The solution, as always, is a land value tax and UBI. Don't need to fret over needing an education to live comfortably if you can already afford and place to live and food.