chaonaut

joined 1 year ago
[–] chaonaut@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm not sure how "tens of billions of dollars of military aid" counts as not intervening in a foreign conflict.

It is a bit galling to be told endlessly that we must shut up and choose when the choice is "genocide or more genocide", even when the reason Harris is on the top of the ballot at all is as a result of speaking up about the issues with Biden. I'm not all that comfortable merely accepting that, to escape the chopping block myself, I must remain silent about my family members. I'm sorry that Harris is so tied to Israel's expansionist agenda that my inability to stomach rampant slaughter is threatening her and the Democratic party's chances against Trump and the Republican party, but I can't let some tens of thousands of killing go.

[–] chaonaut@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

Perhaps they should have left Western style Manifest Destiny in the past.

[–] chaonaut@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Expecting Christians to follow a given text to the letter will always be setting yourself up for failure. Not only do people pick and choose the doctrine they follow (or more often have it picked and chosen for them by their spiritual leader), different traditions have different emphasis and even different texts they're operating off of. Expecting an legalistic following of a specific interpretation will leave you expecting far different behavior that most of your observations will show.

[–] chaonaut@lemmy.world 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The Heritage Foundation is wild, and one of the most significant public policy groups with deep ties to American conservatism. Basically, any crazy policy that the Republican party has taken on as a major party plank in the past 50 years has a distressing high chance of having its roots in Heritage's recommendations.

For example, in 1981:

Among the 2,000 Heritage policy recommendations, approximately 60% of them were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan's first year in office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation

[–] chaonaut@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The prices for fixed costs have gone up, too. People need a place to live, the health to keep living, and ways of ensuring access to both, and the costs of all of those have gone up as well. A not insignificant chuck of people don't have discretionary spending to cut (not to mention how stressful living paycheck-to-paycheck on the bare essentials can be). Yes, it is certainly worth reevaluating budgets and determining where expenses can be lowered, but those margins have been getting thinner for a long while.