Hardkill

Hopefully Bidenomics will finally put an end to the zombie Reagonomics that has already had too much of an influence on our country for far too long. I don't even think that Reaganomics is really popular anymore in America. Considering that Neoliberalism/Reaganism has lasted for over 4 decades now, and the failures of that economic philosophy have now become apparent to enough people in America, do you think we are now on our way to going back to the kind of regimented capitalism or social democracy we had throughout the entire extended New Deal era during the mid 1900s?

So then why isn't having a muscular physique and combat skills enough to become socially successful with people and get laid with any kind of woman you want?

Not entirely true. In fact.... Arizona which used to be a red for decades has become purple and increasingly turning blue. Former confederates including which used to be deep red states including Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina are either on their way towards being purple states or have now become purple and are now on there way towards becoming blue states. Even with Florida, which has been heavily influenced by Trump and DeSantis for a long while, I don't think that state will continue to be solid red forever. Several years from now, extreme right-wingers such as those two will eventually lose their great influence over Floridians given how radical Republican leaders like them have become. Furthermore, while it still is surprising in some ways that Florida has become a solid red state, look at its demographics. Florida has one of the most racially/ethnically diverse states in the country. It is one of the wealthiest states in the country. It is one of the largest and one of the most densely populated states in the country. It's state has an above average educated/forward-thinking population per capita compared to most other states. It also doesn't have nearly as large of a percentage of socially conservative christians as almost every other southern and midwestern state in the entire Bible belt region of the country does (except to a very small portion of Illinois). Therefore, Florida already has had most of the characteristics of what makes a blue state.

I don't think that CBT itself will completely treat any psychological you have, but practicing it absolutely makes a significant positive difference in your mental health and well-being and overall wellness. I've used it a number of times before and it really helped me to manage my anxiety and depression much better and even desensitized a lot of the irrational fears I used to have with talking to other people socially, getting rejected by others including girls, possibly failing at something I deemed important, etc.

Well, it has been tried, but didn't you say that going to war only makes conflict or gridlock worse and further divides people?

I do believe in the need in fighting the good fight and the need for a benevolent monopoly of force, but what about some diplomacy?

Thank God the US Supreme Court ruled solidly against the idea that state legislatures have the absolute power to decide who wins each of their own states for the electoral college in a presidential election and who wins any congressional election held in each of their own states! If SCOTUS ruled in favor of this argument then they would've essentially terminated any form of real democracy in the USA.

Biden yesterday announced that he will be forgiving up to $20,000 for millions of borrowers and extending the payment freeze one final time until the end of the year. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/24/politics/student-loans-joe-biden-white-house/index.html https://www.npr.org/2022/08/25/1119343754/what-you-need-to-know-about-bidens-student-loan-announcement https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/24/politics/biden-student-loan-forgiveness-qualify/index.html Some top economists say that this will increase inflation to some extent. https://fortune.com/2022/08/25/jason-furman-blasts-joe-biden-rekless-student-loan-forgiveness/ https://thehill.com/policy/finance/3610940-larry-summers-says-white-house-shouldnt-extend-student-loan-payment-pause/ Other top economists say that it won't. https://thehill.com/policy/3614573-how-will-bidens-student-loan-plan-impact-inflation/ What are your thoughts?

Yeah, like that's ever going to happen sometime in the foreseeable future.... For decades, Congress has had way too much gridlock, too many Republicans, too many right wing corporate Democrats who have gotten too deep into the pockets of greedy megadonors. Sadly, all of these problems with Congress are only going to continue to get increasingly worse for God know how long. Also, because of how incredibly balkanized America has gotten, I don't see how we will be able to elect a supermajority of Democrats and/or liberals/progressives into Congress. Perhaps calling the mounting student debt situation in the country a crisis is hyperbolic. However, as far as I can tell, it looks like we're doomed to fail in solving this major issue, unless we have a powerful enough liberal/progressive movement and if both neoliberalism and the culture war we are in finally come to an end.

You sound a lot like my parents now, even though they are liberal democrats. lol I mean, I get that, but Americans owe $1.78 trillion and it's only going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. So, how will we ever be able to solve the student loan crisis in our country if the government will never step in to help solve this in anyway?

I am actually with you on this personally. I just hope that this doesn't become a precedent for the courts to eventually rollback any serious LGBTQ+ rights in the future. I understand that argument, but it was popular and most people with large student debt have been unable to pay off student from no fault of their own despite their best efforts. So, if all of these rulings were actually reasonable, then how does all of this improve the optics for Biden and make the right-wing look even worse than before?

Okay, I see the point there, but why are voters so evenly divided on the ruling of the LGBTQ+ rights case? Why do even a narrow majority of voters agree with the ruling on the student debt cancellation, despite Biden's student debt forgiveness having been quite popular?

Most of the federal courts, including SCOTUS, have undoubtedly become corrupt partisan right-wing partisan hacks. So, why does this poll show that some majority of Americans actually agreed with all 3 of those SCOTUS rulings? https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/americans-split-recent-supreme-court-decisions

But many true geniuses such as Einstein, Socrates, Noam Chomsky, Mozart, Leonardo Da Vinci, Picasso, etc. all went to and taught at top universities including MIT, Caltech, Harvard, Princeton, and many other prestigious colleges/universities. So, did all of them become grossly corrupt?

Well, I hope this doesn't sound presumptuous, but I think that the Public Ivies have truly become the best colleges/universities in the entire USA. This is further going to come off as me being rather boastful, but I myself graduated from UCLA, which has become arguably become tied with UC Berkeley for being the best public university in America and is now undoubtedly equally as hard to get accepted into as virtually any of original Ivy League schools. The Public Ivies offer the very same level of top collegiate experience as that of any of the OG Ivy League schools. However, because Public Ivies are public and more down to earth, I think that they are better than the OG Ivy League schools, because the former are not nearly expensive and probably not as corrupt as the latter. Plus, schools such as UCLA, Cal, and other UC schools have much better connections to the visual and performing arts industries and entertainment industries than any of the original Ivies do.I think that other UC schools such as UCI and UC san Diego seem to be on there way to one day becoming as hard to get into as UCLA, Berkeley, or any of the other top Ivies are. the US Military Academy at West Point, US Naval Academy, United States Air Force Academy, are the three top undergraduate military institutions that are equally as hard to get into as any of the original Ivies, and in some ways deserve much more respect than any Ivy. While US Coast Guard and U.S. Merchant Marine Academy are not quite as hard to get into as the Army, Navy, and Air Force academies are, they are still highly competitive and also deserve tremendous respect. There are many other public colleges/universities out there in the US that are rising to the top with regard to both prestige and difficulty of getting accepted into. As for MIT and Caltech, I don't think that they are as pretentious as any of the original Ivies and they are extremely respectable, but the collegiate experiences there are pretty boring, and most people in those school are of course nerdy. USC, another school, I graduated from for my Master's degree, is a private university that of course rivals UCLA in almost every way. Furthermore, there are also many other private universities such as Tufts University, that are about as reputable and as hard to get into as any Ivy school in the country.

These bad rulings, on top of the other ruling that ended affirmative action in college rulings, have resulted in a very sad week for many people in this country including many college students, a number of black and brown people, and some members of the LGBTQ+ members.

Yeah that's true. That's also why there must be and will be a profound liberal backlash to all of this right-wing authoritarianism happening in our country. It may not happen tomorrow or next year or in the next few years but IT WILL HAPPEN sometime in future......mark my words.

But as I mentioned in one of my latest threads, liberals and progressives MUST still combat all of the extreme right-wing media out there by growing their media ecosystem until it one day is able to rival and then surpass the right wing media. Centrist mainstream media new channels such as CNN and ABC are no longer enough to stave off the threat of all of the right-wing disinformation that’s been out there for far too long. We can’t no longer just let the far right continue eroding our country’s democracy and trust in the right institutions and the right leaders of our country.

He and the Republican party need to shift a lot more to the center as soon as they can. Ever since Bush ended his presidency in 2009, the GOP as a whole has undoubtedly become increasingly an unpopular and undemocratic party, especially ever since Trump first rose to power in 2016. Not only has the Republican party won the popular vote in presidential election only once out of the past 8 presidential elections since 1988, but also no republican presidential candidate has ever actually won the majority of moderate voters throughout the whole country since 1984. DeSantis himself has now turned out to be both unpopular and perceived to be a fascist even within his own state.

Even if DeSantis would be a new face for the entire GOP, not only is coming off as fascist to some majority of Americans, he doesn't really even have charisma like Trump does, let alone doesn't have in anyway the broad appeal charisma that Reagan had. I've seen how DeSantis converses with people and he really comes off as a boring person who isn't able to even connect well with others socially. Trump is skilled with coming off as being relating to a lot of people at a deep level, is witty, and influenced a sizable portion of Americans to never waver in their loyalty and devotion to him regardless of what scandal or what political issue he's involved in. Reagan was also a "teflon" president who had an aura of warmth and invincibility that both strengthened his influence with Congress and helped make the criticisms of his shortcomings become not much of a problem for him politically.

Okay, yeah that's what I thought. In fact, Trump was basically playing nice with Putin primarily because he was really in Putin's pocket. At least has the balls to public announce that Putin is a thug and a killer. Furthermore, and most importantly, Biden was truly the main leader of NATO who came up with the idea of uniting NATO and Ukraine against Russia. None of the leader of any of the other countries in NATO such as Macron, Trudeau, Johnson (I believe at the time), Merkel, or anyone else in NATO other than Biden. He may not have the great appeal, youthful appearance, commanding presence, intellectual giftedness that Obama and Bill Clinton had, but he is definitely politically savvy in his own right. He undeniably has had the greatest amount of experience, knowledge, and intuitive understanding of how things work in Washington, politics, foreign affairs, than literally any other president in US history. Plus, he did graduate from a decent law school without much help unlike the kind of unfair advantage that W. Bush and Trump got from each of their fathers' connections to the respective schools they each graduated from. Not to mention, that Biden like Obama was a constitutional law professor at a top university.

Actually, interestingly enough, according to a number of polls, more voters say that they rather have Biden than even DeSantis because they think that DeSantis is also coming off as too much of an authoritarian like Trump. The GOP elites and the Republican Party are really scaring off too many swing voters.

I totally agree with you again. Though do you believe that it's possible that something like the War in Ukraine may not have ever happened if Biden was able to present himself better as a strong leader like the way Bill Clinton or Obama did during their presidencies because of their charisma, relatively young and strong appearance, and political savvy?

I am totally with you on everything you just said, but do you think that Biden will be able to convince the majority of Americans that he is capable of serving a 2nd term, despite the fact that most Americans still think he's too old for the job? Unfortunately, even a lot of elderly people in the US have said that he's looking like he's not going to make it for another term. Even my dad and my uncle who are both older than 80 years old, highly-educated, very smart, successful, liberal democrats really don't want Biden to run again because they too perceive Biden to come off as a doddering old man that's a bit out of it. Also, they understand from their own personal experiences how much your own memory, energy, sharpness, judgment, and some other mental abilities significantly decline when you're around their age. My dad further said that there's a reason why almost no one over 75 years old really works full-time in any job, especially one that's extremely mentally and physically taxing. My response to him was "Well what about some of the judges on the Supreme Court or many of those Congress who were or are over 80 years old?" My dad then was like "Well, first off, serving as a member of Congress is much easier than being the President of the United States of America. In fact, I honestly think that being a Senator or a House of Representative seems to be an easy cushy job, given how much everyone in Congress usually doesn't do much, except waste an incredible amount of time having all kind of bullshit debates on the Senate or House floor, holding things up in the various committees they have in Congress, preventing most bills from ever getting passed (especially in this day and age), and talking to the press about what may or may not happen in Congress. Also, members of Congress seem to get a lot more time off from work than the President of the United States does. As for the judges on the courts, yeah that definitely take a lot more work than being a member of Congress, but it's still not nearly as demanding as being the president of the most powerful country in the world who also has to frequently travel to all kind of places in the world and has to constantly manage not just everything that goes in a country that one's of the largest nations in the world, but also has to constantly handle so much of what is happening internationally throughout the whole world." My mom who is going to be 75 this year and is also a highly-educated, very smart, successful liberal democrat totally agrees with all of that.

Last year, I asked on this forum what Biden has accomplished so far as president: I thought that the responses from some of the people on that thread include Leo himself, had some very good responses to my question. Plus, at that time, Biden and Congress had already passed both the American Rescue Plan, which was a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which was the largest infrastructure bill/largest public works bill ever passed since 1956, when Eisenhower and the 84th Congress has passed the Interstate Highway Act. Furthermore, this was all before Biden and the Democrats actually ended up passing an amazing slew of additional significant bills that lead to much further change in domestic policy on a national level. In fact, top US historian, Allan Lichtman, has even said that Biden has already accomplished a greater record in domestic policy change legislatively than any president since the 1960s. What's even more impressive is that Biden achieved all of these historic pieces of legislation during his first 2 years as president, even when back then not only did he and his party only have razor thin majorities in both chambers of Congress, but also were legislating during the most politically polarized period ever in US history since the Civil War or the Gilded Ages. Plus, through executive orders alone, he has already made the most improvement on racial equity than any president since LBJ. Additionally, he became the very first president ever to both pardon Americans serving prison time on federal simple marijuana possession charges and to direct a review of marijuana scheduling. Furthermore, he has reversed many of the bad Trump admin policies with executive orders. Moreover, he has presided over arguably the fastest economic recovery in perhaps all of US history and over the strongest post-pandemic recovery of any major economy, including the creation of 13m jobs – more than any president has created in an entire four-year term – and the lowest unemployment for half a century. Plus, Biden was the western leader who was primarily responsible for reuniting the entire NATO coalition in order to best support Ukraine defend itself against Russia. Because of Biden's leadership, Russia has for well over a year been unable to defeat and takeover Ukraine. Also, Biden was the one who finally ended the War in Afghanistan. The media, except for MSNBC and some progressive outlets that give balanced views, have done a really bad job of covering all of Biden's really great successes.