As Hurricane Helene careened toward Florida’s Panhandle, numerous Republicans voted against extending funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Last week, Congress approved $20 billion for FEMA’s disaster relief fund as part of a stopgap spending bill to fund the government through December 20. But the measure left out billions of dollars in requested supplemental disaster funding.
The Senate approved the measure by a 78-18 vote on September 25 after it passed the House in a 341-82 vote. Republicans supplied the no votes in both chambers.
Some of the Republicans who voted against the bill represent states that have been hard hit by Helene, including Florida Representative Matt Gaetz.
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I’d imagine they’ve proven otherwise many times. People aren’t one-dimensional pain-inflicting villainous caricatures. But nothing I say would convince you of that.
If you can give me a single solid event, I might be willing to believe it. But when people ask for proof and you respond “it’s happened, many people are saying it, but you wouldn’t believe me” that’s not a very convincing argument. Nor are the actions of local Republicans a convincing argument in favor of them not being mustache-twirling comic book villains. I believe this about them because this is all that they have given me reason to believe about them. If your every action is in service to evil then I label you evil. I will change my labels if and when they choose to act outside of them. I have seen precious little acting outside of that label since I’ve been old enough to pay attention to politics.
Ok, if you say “show me one single act where a Republican acted with any singular other interest besides the explicit directive of making people suffer” I’ll spend my time finding an instance. Or you can just admit that you didn’t mean what you said, and no matter what I say you won’t change your mind, and we can go about our days.
You find me one example of a conservative in office who has acted like an objectively good person, and acted in the interests of other people without a profit motive, within the last 20 years and I’ll admit right here in the public forum that some conservative officials are good people.
Whether you take me up on that or not is up to you. I’m not really going to lose any sleep over it either way. My intention here isn’t to make you do homework to try and prove me wrong about something. My intention is to highlight that people are their actions, and if we pay attention to the actions of sitting Republicans, every action they make is in pursuit of personal profit or of harming the other. There are almost certainly isolated cases here and there where one of them has acted in a manner befitting a public official, but I couldn’t name any of those times and if you go searching for one I expect you’re going to have quite a bit of homework attempting to find one.
If your every action serves evil then I label you evil. If nearly every action serves evil but not all of them we promise, that’s still not a great look and I am not sympathetic to it.
You are right, in a way, in that I’m pretty confident you aren’t going to change my opinions in any fundamental way here today. But that’s not because I’m unwilling to listen to an alternate point of view, it’s because I come armed with knowledge. I already know what these people do. I have already tried to discuss, and share, and debate with conservative supporting citizens for many many years already. My open mind has led me to the conclusion that some percentage of them are truly genuinely wonderful people that are tragically misinformed about the world around them. Many more are just ignorant, some willfully so. And the small percent that remains are the ones that typically end up in office under Republican colors, who are the ones who discovered they can espouse these views in order to amass personal power beneath the eaves of a massive propaganda network set up and abused by the generations preceding and feeding off the energy (and donations! Somehow!) of the poor, misinformed, typically rural, american.
Please note that “all Republicans are evil” does not also mean “all Democrats are good” nor does it mean that all republican voters are evil. Most of them just aren’t being presented with a factual view of the world that surrounds them. They are victims in this system. But what it does mean, and this is the hill I’ll die on regarding this subject, is that all Republican officials who currently hold office in the United States of America are horrid, vile little shits and it’s an order of magnitude easier to find evidence corroborating that rather than refuting it. You have a pretty good chance of being able to reply to this with an article showing that the governor of Indiana built an orphanage once in 2018 or something, and feeling good that you’ve got one over on me, but if that’s the case then you’ve really missed the point of what I’m trying to communicate here. You don’t seem like an unreasonable person. You haven’t called me names or rage quit the conversation and I respect that and wish to respond in kind. I do not think that you, personally, are an evil or stupid person. But I do think you need to take a critical look at most of your representatives in our government, and really see what they’re up to. It’s easy to be blinded by propaganda, I am not immune to it and neither are you, and it’s been getting really bad these days. But just listen to what they say from their own mouths and ask yourself if that’s what you want representing you to the world at large.
I think, for the most part, Republican politicians are pieces of shit.
If you look at my comments in this thread, I am talking about the consensus on lemmy/reddit that any Republican (not just politicians) are not only vile monsters, but that their only motivation is to cause suffering. This thought has been shown to me many times in many comment threads, including this one.
You are not making the same argument that I’ve heard many times before. Others in this thread are making that argument.
Also, it’s absolutely insane to me that stating the belief that “all Republicans aren’t one-dimensional villainous caricatures” gets me labeled as a Republican. I’m a straight ticket dem voter and have literally never voted for a Republican, even when (as often happens in my state ) my only option was a Republican.
That’s fair, I am but one among many. A lot of folks fail to realize that our perspectives don’t arise from a vacuum. As one example, fundamentalist Christian folks don’t hate trans folks because they just want to see them suffer, they hate them because they’ve been instructed by a malicious actor that their religion requires them to hate them and that they are a threat to public order. Ditto for a hundred other conflicts of opinion in modern America. We have been set against one another, set up like pawns across a chessboard. And those who fail to observe the bigger picture of the chessboard will be played like the pawns they’ve been cast as.
Everyone has a reason why they believe the things that they believe. Unfortunately it’s generally much easier to just discard that context, especially in a social media environment where that context is invisible and must be inferred, and the crowd is going to follow the path of least resistance generally speaking. I don’t know how to fix that.
Agree on all fronts.
Lemmy is increasingly seeming like a more reddit-y reddit to me.
Look if you can’t find one, just admit it and move on.
Still waiting…
Lol I don’t hear you saying “show me one single act where a Republican acted with any singular other interest besides the explicit directive of making people suffer”
I remember a few years ago the Republicans jammed through some piece of legislation that would allow terminal patients to take experimental medications. Even people on the left got fooled, thinking it was some benevolent thing that Trump and his team did for dying patients.
Really, what they did was create a loophole for drug manufacturers to allow them to skip right ahead to human trials, as long as they could find a patient desperate enough to sign a waiver, which, of course anyone who is terminal is also desperate enough to try anything; in law it’s called duress and it voids consent. It’s one step below doing forced medical testing on unwilling subjects.
There’s a reason we do drug trials and we don’t just skip straight into human testing. And I’m sure they gave it some fucking dumbass lie of a name like, the Compassionate Care Act or something. Pharmaceutical companies love it because it slashes the cost of testing, which is the most expensive part of pharmaceuticals after advertising.
I can’t honestly think of a single policy that Republicans support that doesn’t have an evil purpose at its core.
And I bet that you can’t show me one.
You tell me one Republican policy you think is rooted in compassionate and benevolence, and a genuine desire to help people in need of help, and I will take about ten seconds to point out exactly how you got tricked, and what the law actually does, just like with the human testing law I mentioned; The point of it wasn’t exclusively to make people suffer, it was to give a handout to the pharmaceutical industry, and Trump’s rich supporters.
I did a Google search earlier for another user, and Wikipedia mentioned that in 2006, repubs expanded Medicare and introduced a new plan for seniors. Feel free to tell me how that was evil
Hey you picked one I know a little about since I deal in liability for personal injuries, including medical care. Do some reading. The entire bill is a massive handout to the pharmaceutical industry and the billionaire class.
It created HSAs which is a way for large employers to past the cost of medical insurance on to their employees; basically allows companies to give their employees gift cards to use for medical care while saving money on premiums by providing shittier coverage. This is a subsidy for big corporations and the rich; they depend hand-to-mouth on the good health of lowly employees, and they will place as much of that liability as possible onto their employees, but won’t similarly share profits. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses. It would certainly benefit our country in every way to have every person in it covered for healthcare 24/7, 365 by a single payer, the SSA. As it is now, health coverage is all broken up and fractured. Try getting seriously hurt the job and see if you don’t spend the rest of your natural life in the middle of a fight between two giants over who should be the primary payer, either the workers comp insurer or the SSA or your health insurer, and neither has any concern whether you actually get the care you need, in fact they’d prefer you did not get it.
The same law also put a new focus in the SSA on recoupment in cases of a secondary payer. So like if you’re getting healthcare because you got in an accident or if you were at work, the SSA can come after you, the secondary payer, the doctor, or your lawyer, whoever got paid, if SSA finds out that they paid as primary when they should have been a secondary, or a conditional payer. So like if you get $100,000 settlement for a car accident, but oopsie Medicare accidentally paid for most of your medical treatment, you could get a bill from the feds in five years for $150,000, or a denial of $150,000 worth of future Medicare benefits, to make up for it. The 2006 law modernized the systems for making these collections.
As part of that same modernization, they took a bunch of jobs that used to exist in the private sector for claims administration on Medicare Parts A and B, and placed the burden of that administration on the federal government. Usually im all for creating good federal jobs, but only for Literally getting the government to do corporation’s work for them, so that corporations could cut the jobs. Privatize the profit, socialize the loss. No big deal, only your tax money being handed directly to people who own insurance companies.
The main handout was to prevent the federal government, Medicare, from negotiating with pharmacaceutical companies over the price of prescription drugs. Think of how ridiculous that is and how hypocritical it is? The Republicans who claim to love the free market so much prevented the largest buyer of medications from negotiating the price. No discounts for buying in bulk. That’s your tax money I’m talking about buying meds, and Republicans made sure that pharmaceutical companies could set their own prices. They got massively richer after 2006.
In short, yes, this law was very beneficent, if you own an insurance company.
I’m not sure you’re making the point you think you’re making. Do you want to point to a dem policy? So I can tell you exactly who profited?
Jk I don’t actually care lol. The vitriol I receive from saying “humans aren’t black and white, 50% of the country aren’t motivated solely by causing suffering” is reward enough.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskConservatives/s/y1VhdzJJp9
Please show me the nefarious motivations for every response in this thread, then prove to me that Dems don’t have nefarious motivations for every single policy they support. I want you to be as critical of dem policy as you are about the experimental drug policy - that is to say, ignore the obvious good it does and look for a way that it could be maliciously interpreted.
After all, I’m sure my aunt Michael didn’t actually want to get into the drug experiment that my mom drove her across the country to attempt to join. She should have had the decency to accept dying of cancer a few months later so that pharmaceuticals couldn’t take advantage of other people with 3 months to live. I’m sure you’d feel the same way if you had terminal cancer.
You know using absolute terms as frequently as you do is a sign of early onset dementia?
People in that thread have already ripped that post apart.
You pick one policy, don’t hand me a list of 50 and then tell me to prove a negative, you donkey.
Well, you picked one and I picked one. You chose the “right to try”, ignored all the positives, focused on some possible negative, then implied that every Repub that voted for it did so only in order to further their evil plans.
Then I chose the expansion of Medicare in 2006, and got crickets.
You ignored all of that and focused in on a reddit thread showing the exact type of extremist responses that you’re exhibiting here. And called me a donkey. Guess you’re having a bad day. Hope it gets better, sweetheart. High school is tough
Can you find one vote which republicans voted for people?
Wikipedia says congressional Republicans expanded Medicare, supporting a new drug plan for seniors starting in 2006.
Now can you please move the goalposts, tell me why it doesn’t count, it was too long ago, etc. I’m sure there’s no way I could spend another 20 seconds finding other examples lol
So at best they are just stupid.
It doesn’t take stupidity to be caught up in propaganda.
So far you have said nothing to answer the question.