Biden Thread

[Montmorency]

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None of the above makes for a case that Manchin has been externally influenced in his filibuster stance.

On minimum wage, for example, we can expect Manchin, like a typical politician, to be influenable on the question of the minimum wage because: the minimum wage is a single narrow issue that can be amended on a sliding scale rather than as a binary; Manchin has himself proposed or claimed to support modest increases; his arguments against larger increases refer to the financial health of certain low-wage industries and their workers. On the latter, it is a fair hypothesis that a lobbying group, whether with cover letters or with financial sticks and carrots, could reinforce talking points against a minimum wage increase in his mind.

Whereas the discussion around the filibuster is of a procedural change with no direct implications to any interest group outside the US government, a change that is a party consensus by now and is really necessary to have any hope of stopping the Republicans from fucking us all (and not just in terms of petty partisan advantage).

There is only one remaining - backdoor - argument, which is that Manchin actually doesn't want to pass anything that's in Biden's agenda or that his colleagues have advanced, and is covering for himself by pretending to lean on procedural and meta-political objections. But I don't see even this tack as credible because such a Manchin may as well have refused to cooperate on so much as the pandemic recovery legislation, or just defected to the Republican Party outright and reaped immediate rewards from them. At any rate, Dems have only 50 votes on paper, so there's nothing stopping Manchin from conditioning a filibuster-break on legislation being stripped of anything that offends his "corporate masters." That he doesn't take that approach, the one where he gets billions for West Virginia and a 'win' for his party WHILE defending any special interests he might want to defend, should be conclusive against the theory that he is corrupt in this regard.

I continue to rest my case that Manchin is a true believer in the ideology of the bipartisan Senate.

Essentially, you seem to not recognize that societal and political developments related to 'social justice' present any risks to 'good people'. In actual reality, people generally present a risk to other people in one form or another.

It becomes strongly ironic when a lot of relevant ire is directed at the police, an organisation with a core purpose of supressing antisocial behaviour and facilitating delivery of justice. An organisation that is furthermore funded by the state and not run in accordance with capitalist ideals of maximizing profit.

What would a good person have to fear from an organisation that has such noble goals and that can not make profit? It's not coming for you (plural), is it?

Bewildering.

As far as I can reconstruct, you seem to be saying:

1. Social justice movements are a threat (to whom? how?).
2. They are sometimes not perceived as a threat because the goals are noble.
3. This is misguided because police have noble goals and they are perceived as a threat.

(3) is obviously a wrong premise, but it is also irrelevant to any conceivable discussion of contemporary politics, which must revolve around something called "facts of the matter." Saddam Hussein had some potentially-noble goals in invading Iran and Kuwait, if we're being selective.

I will also point out that people who dislike state violence dislike it because it is violence and in a given case unjust violence at that; the source of the violence being the state does not somehow relieve just because the people in question tend to like eusocial state investment and facilitation of healthy relations and environments. Indeed, it would be just the opposite for them, because the state has a higher burden of trust and responsibility to satisfy as a basis of its authority; when it engages in oppressive behavior it is violating that trust and responsibility in a way that norm-bound or legally-bound private individuals, or even organizations, really can't. (This may or may not be constructed in terminology of a social "contract", but that's neither here nor there.)