Some folks were watching Colbert talk about the student debt crisis and I asked if Colbert mentioned that it was all Joe’s fault. Joe championed the 2005 bill that made discharging student debts in bankruptcy illegal, which escalated the already dire tuition problems and created the student debt crisis.
To me, there’s a pretty straight lne of causality there; joe does something horrible and then a few years later there is a massive predictable disaster.
Since Joe championed the bill and worked hard to make it happen, since he holds great political power, he’s personally responsible for the student debt crisis. He is answerable, as an individual, for what happened.
The folks were like “nah, it’s not joe’s fault, it’d been happening since blah blah blah Reagan state colleges”.
I don’t really understand how people assign guilt and fault and responsibilty. For me - person with power does or supports bad thing, so they are at fault and can be made to answer for what happened. But lots of people get cross with me for treating Biden the same way i’d treat someone who reduced millions of people to debt peonage or murdered hundreds of thousands of people or whatever. Like kill one person you’re a monster, but at some point ordering the murder of vast numbers of people creates no moral stain?
This all came to mind, really, bc I saw a picture of Jenny McCarthy. McCarthy going on Oprah to peddle anti-vax bullshit bc she hated her son is, afaik, where anti-vax really broke in to the main-stream. And the direct result is i have acne from wearing a mask to avoid long covid. McCarthy and Winfrey, as much as any two individuals can, hold responsibility for bringing that about by bringing McCarthy’s anti-science hatred of autistic people and the related anti-vax bs to a vast audience. Someone else could have done it, it might have happened without them, but Winfrey did use her massive platform to throw open the gates of hell, so she’s responsible.
It’s always seemed pretty clear cut to me. You do a thing, what happens next, forseeable or not, is your fault and responsibiliy. You give an order and you are morally culpable for what your minions do next, regardless of whether they did what you intended. You assume an office and you’re responsible, personally, for every single thing done in the name and on the authority of that office. That’s just how power works. If you wield it then you did it, then it’s your fault, even if you directed someone else’s hand to wield the knife.
Fatalists forget that the material conditions that shape history include the people involved. The bill took the specific shape it did because Biden was involved. Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but the specifics would certainly be different. Each person involved changes the material conditions because we are material too.
There’s also the “someone would have done it, but it didn’t have to be you” thing. Yeah, lots of people lined up to do the bad thing, but you got in the line. You didn’t have to. You made a choice and you can’t just handwave “historical circumstances” as though nebulous historical forces handed you the knife and moved your arm. Like a child soldier can be like “yeah i had no meaningful agency here” but not Brandon or Obama or whatever other truly powerful villain.
I agree. It’s why I’d still kill baby Hitler if I had the opportunity. Even if another one takes his place, I’d travel back in time and kill him too if that was a choice. Just because there’s a long line of fascists willing to carry on a similar agenda doesn’t mean you stop attempting to make that line shorter. It’s just that other things contribute to its length as well.
Maybe if Biden didn’t champion the student debt crisis, somebody else would’ve. But then it’d be that other guy’s fault. And if that other guy didn’t do it, maybe it’d be some third guy who would, but it’d still the third guy’s fault. And we can keep doing this over and over again, but eventually it’s either somebody’s fault, or we ran out of people and nobody does the bad thing. Blaming the one person who actually ends up doing the bad thing is sufficient: it doesn’t take extra effort for how many people could’ve done it. We won’t even know how many people that is - maybe 20 more important senators already considered a similar bill and backed off because they didn’t want to deal with the eventual backlash.
Yes, fuck’em. Like obviously there’s greater structural issues going on, but they’re also key players/pawns in the spectacle. And yes, on the one hand we’re all victims of fate in a cosmic play of determinism, including these assholes; But I live down here in the muck and moment where I have to fight these devils, not up in the heavens where I can take comfort that in the grand scale it’s all just inertia and entropy. The devils are committing social murder, and thus as potential victims, it’s our right and duty to defend ourselves and work for a world in which we’re all not oppressed.
Just shifting the blame backwards in time is definitely not very honest, Reagan was equally a personification of powers beyond him as Biden, but they are still these personifications willingly, we should not waste our time defending them just because they did it all in a context.
Like kill one person you’re a monster, but at some point ordering the murder of vast numbers of people creates no moral stain?
Liberals and conservatives ascribe the whole “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic” to Ebil Man Thanos Stalin, but in my lifetime I’ve seen each American president kill thousands, millions of people and they just appear on TV drinking wine and making jokes with comedians after they retire.
I think it’s them failing to reconcile their support for Biden in light of what he does/did/will do. It could have been somebody else who mishandled covid when the pandemic started, but I blame trump because he was in office.
He was responsible at the time and if Hillary was president, she would have been responsible. I don’t know how she would have handled it, I think I could guess, but she would have been the one with power in that situation.
And besides we don’t have to worry about someone else who would have done it anyway. We live in the world where specific people did things. Reagan was responsible for fucking up education in the US, but so was Biden with the debt bills. Biden is still currently responsible every day he goes without forgiving student debt.
This stuff is only complicated if you want to support the liberal status quo. Otherwise, you can point to the material conditions that changed as a result of someone’s actions and build your opinion from there.
Saying someone else would have done the same thing is intellectually dishonest and lazy. It doesn’t make anything better, it just serves as an excuse to disengage from the reality of a situation.
Just tell them that you won’t vote for Biden then. As if he wasn’t responsible or whatever, then neither are you, whatever happens will happen.
In fact, it doesn’t even matter who the president is! If someone else will just do what Biden would have done, and someone else will do what Trump might do, the actors don’t matter at all.
in several cases the someone else who will do what trump would’ve done is literally biden
One of my biggest annoyances with capitalism is the way their participants bend reality to argue that capitalist guilty people aren’t in fact guilty
If you wanted, you could argue it from a purely technocratic perspective and say, sure, the lack of state funding for colleges made college less affordable, but there was still the implicit promise that if you took out loans to finance your education and that education didn’t make you financially better off, the state would reassume the burden. In fact, the affordability crisis might have gotten attention sooner if it did lead to a lot of bankruptcies because the federal government would suddenly be out a lot of money and it would be incentivized to pressure states to keep costs down.
Focus the conversation on Joe’s decision to remove bankruptcy protections, because that’s the issue - there was a safety valve (that most likely sucked, but it was at least there) where borrowers could get relief, Joe took that valve away, and that has allowed the problem to fester far beyond the measures he’s taken to ameliorate it.
It’s trite, yes, but ask if they feel that way about Hitler. Because they definitely do not.
Stalin! Stalin! The only person in a country of almost 200 million people who made any decisions about anything between 1905 and 1991! Everything is literally and personally his fault, and no one else did anything during the entire time the USSR existed, which according to liberals it still does and it’s still Stalin’s fault!
i mean you’re right but blame/responsibility doesn’t give way to much personal emnity for me especially on things we all knew were going to happen because of class imperatives: like yeah Biden ended covid relief & safety, but when literally everyone in the political establishment up to & including Bernie Sanders was going to do that, it feels wasteful to put that anger specifically to him & not the system. this might be overcorrection from dealing with liberals who insist replacing a person in power can fix everything & having to explain the systemic first principles of issues all the time
Oh yeah, fuck them as individuals, they’re just cogs in the machine, but in terms of responsibility and culpability, you see.
You do a thing, what happens next, forseeable or not, is your fault and responsibiliy.
I think you get some slack for unforeseeable/improbable outcomes. At some point you have to make the best decision possible with the information at hand. If you do that and things still go sideways, what else were you supposed to have done, tell the future?
The way I conceive of responsibility, once to take up power you’re responsible for what happens next. You know, or should know, that weilding power means things may go horrifically, unpredictably wrong. And you’re just as responsible when things go wrong as when they go right. There’s no excuses or outs. You picked up the sword knowing that it would fall somewhere.
So, if crimes happen, you’re responsible. It’s essentially what you agreed to when you took up power. If you failed to control your subordinates then you failed. If you failed to account for an edge case then you failed. You can’t make any excuses bc people are going to be hurt if something goes wrong. You might be absolved in court, but you still have to go to court to answer for whatever happened because you are the responsible party.
I guess in a lot of ways it’s the opposite of corporate diffusion of responsibility. Instead of layers of diffusion and limited liabilty and middle management, you’re responsible for everything you do and everything your minions do and can be called to answer for it.
You’re elected Monday. On Tuesday, something halfway across the country that you’re now in charge of goes wrong in a novel way and kills 20 people. Do you get put on trial for that? Who else does?
